Book Review

Ordinary Lives

By Josef Škvorecký

Published by Key Porter Books

As a reader, there can be few things more satisfying than knowing that one of your favourite authors has written a book specifically with his ‘constant readers’ in mind. This is exactly what Czech writer Josef Škvorecký has done with his new novel Ordinary Lives.

Škvorecký was born in Czechoslovakia in 1924. During the Second World War, when the country was occupied and renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by the Nazis, he was forced to work in an aircraft armaments factory. After the war, he studied English and Philosophy at university in Prague, then did his military service.

Despite his first published novels being banned by the Communist authorities, Škvorecký continued to write, but he fled with his wife to Canada when the Soviet army crushed the Prague Spring in 1968.

This biographical information is pertinent, because several of Škvorecký’s novels feature his fictional alter ego Danny Smiricky, whose charming, too-clever-at-times-for-his-own-good ways often get him into trouble, but rarely get him the girls he fancies.

Danny appears most famously in The Engineer of Human Souls, an epic novel about his exploits in wartime Czechoslovakia and his experience as an exile in Canada, but he initially made his debut in Škvorecký’s debut novel The Cowards (which was banned).

Now, in Ordinary Lives, we have a chance to catch up with Danny and his former classmates. The novel is divided into two parts, each of which describes a school reunion in Danny’s hometown of Kostelec. The first takes place in 1963, twenty years after the class graduated, the second in 1993. Danny returns from Prague for the first reunion, and comes all the way from Canada for the second.

Gatherings of this kind are, by their very nature, exercises in nostalgia. In the faded grandeur of a hotel bar, Danny shares drinks and gossip with friends he hasn’t seen for years. For Danny – and Škvorecký’s faithful readers – it is a chance to remember long-forgotten events and to find out what happened to the inhabitants of Kostelec.

The reunions differ in several respects. Inevitably, fewer people are alive or well enough to attend the latter, and of those that do, most have resigned their membership of the Communist party. With age and a more liberal government comes freedom of a sort.

Danny has always been a nostalgic soul, but by 1993 he is even more so, sipping at Manhattan cocktails (‘pretty much the national drink in my new country’) and pondering the ‘ungovernable flow of wayward memories’ as cigarette smoke swirls around him – memories of Jewish friends who disappeared forever; those who, like Danny, escaped to invent new lives in other countries; and those who stayed behind to face whatever came their way.

In the introduction to his collection Early Stories, John Updike writes about how he felt his 'only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – to give the mundane its beautiful due.' Now, the characters in Škvorecký's books can hardly be described as having lived through mundane times, but they are trying to live normal lives (in so much as any life can be described thus). Danny and his friends are survivors of Europe’s horrendous, tumultuous twentieth century, and as such they have a dignity that lifts them above this most pejorative of terms.

Welcome back, Danny – and thank you Josef Škvorecký.

Reviewed by James Smith

Translator: Paul Wilson