Customer Reviews

My Golden Trades

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is in some ways exactly what it looks like, a survey, to borrow an occupation the narrator held, of life in a police state. However, what Klima does in these connected tales is deceptively difficult. He has written in a style which remains free of ponderousness, which starts with the narrator's attitude and is reflected in the sentences and word choices.

This could not have been easy, and one can think of how pregnant each line could have been. Instead, there is a deft comic touch which helps wring events for their melancholy and, at times, frightening juices. Each story poses a problem for the narrator. As the book proceeds we are invited to watch as he fumbles for some meaning to what happens, while at the same time we know he actively resists the notion that a definite reason can be found to explain why anything happens. We float as he floats, and digress in our own thoughts when he digresses. For this reader, the book became more grave than comic with the last tale, partly due to its content, partly to the picture Klima has built up effectively.

Indeed, the comedy is quietly presented as perhaps the only way to defend oneself against the daily assaults of life under such a regime, and not a completely reliable defense at that. Therein lies the melancholy of this work, which is a good introduction to Klima's art.

One word must be said about the proofreading of the Penguin softcover edition. Perhaps that company simply purchased the text from _Granta_ and decided not to bother with checking if words were repeated needlessly, if the past tense of a word should have been supplied instead of a present, and so on. Errors like that occur much too often (and in so short a book), and are a disservice to the author and the reader.

The sextet of stories presented in this volume are all variations on the theme of work; the "golden trades" of the title represent the employment choices made by the artists of Czechoslovakia in the last decade of communism. This is indeed "mature communism" in its death throes, its last gasp, for as the narrator approaches each of his trades - archeology assistant, courier, engine driver among them - we expect to find a man beaten-down by a society; instead, the artist is triumphantly liberated through the very simplicity of his work. Klima masterfully portrays a man (perhaps himself) at relative peace with his predicament, a man who regrets the course that his country has taken but who nonetheless is able to connect with his fellow man - indeed, with the world - through his everyday jobs. There is the engine driver who blissfully rushes along in his locamotive, flying past the flat-footed police; there is the courier who travels around Prague with nothing more than a leather satchel slung over his shoulder and, in perhaps the best story, there is the surveyor's assistant who achieves an enduring sense of freedom in the lines, angles and boundaries of the countryside. Ivan Klima presents tales of a man forced by the State to wear the clothes of a trade, but a man who retains his artist's soul.

One of the hardest sources of literary material to find here in the Golden City of Prague, I've lately discovered, is a wealth of good translated dissident writing into the English language that's of a certain calibre of quality.

To be sure, there's heaps of translated dissident writing in the marketplace which exists. I know places where I can peruse shelves of samizdat press, shelves and rows and rows of it. Some of it poorly translated, some of it not translated at all. In Ivan Klima's case, I'm impressed by the tenacity with which the man has worked to make his material more widely-read. He wants to leave a certain legacy, and he doesn't want us to forget that life in this halcyoned poor facsimile of Masaryk's First Czechoslovak Republic (so very poor, but that, too, is a learning experience) isn't all that once was...is isn't all about the cheap lifestyle, the easier (although less so than previously) women, and the tasty beer. There was a time that people lived in mortal fear of the common denizens of this land, and its gatekeepers, and where the mere act of stepping outside your home, regardless of the weather, meant that you were taking a giant leap into the unknown. Buying bread might've even been construed by the authorities as an act against the so-called "People," and Klima was the protagonist in many of these so-called farcical tragedies, such was the theatrical equivalent of these day-to-day experiences during the forty-year repugnant reign of the Czechoslovak brand of "Communism." When a great nation in the middle of Europe lost its way. When the memory of a man who worked hard for the majesty of the Bohemian and Moravian and Slovakian spirit was quashed.

These aren't your run-of-the-mill types of short tales, either, gentleman and ladies. They're well-crafted and earthy, and they don't always have nice neat little bowties, either. They terminate on the occasional corkscrew and believe me, it'll get you thinking about things in ways that you haven't before.

More generally, I've begun a gradual gravitation away from all things nice and neat in Storyland, towards more "minor"-ending sorts of yarns. The author maintains enough respect for you and his other readership that he doesn't want to prejudice your thinking and give too much away at any time. There's too much gold at stake in attempting to hijack your delicate conscience with his own fancied conclusions, however just they may ostensibly be...Klima rather posits that better *you* bring your life experience to bear on what may have happened to these various delicious protagonists. You tell me, Klima seems to be beckoning. *You* give me the straight goods. Tell me how it affected you, he says. I'm not going to do it for you.

Is this an essential stylistic difference between North American and European writers? I dunno...styles are being challenged and trounced all the time in the 21st-century. I've heard many times about the death and resurrection of the classic form of the novel or the anthology, only to witness the establishment of the "new normal." Besides, what the heck do I know? I'm just starting out in this game myself, and in instances like these I prefer to defer to the so-called greats. The ones who have made it before, published heapingly, and who have suffered in life to a much larger extent than most. They truly have earned the right to voice their opinions or to even deign to engage in such heady things as societal paradigm shifts (through the written word). I'm merely learning, as I've said...

Through Paul Wilson's gifted translation into English, Klima's message shines mightily through. I understand the relationships between these characters, and I at once understand their base desires, their thrusts, and their essential motivations in what impels them along their different paths.

What you know about Klima's protagonists is that there's a reason they're acting the way they're so seemingly strangely acting. They've had to resort to a variety of so-called illicit activities because a so-called regime has declared them persona non grata. They eke out hardscrabble existences doing things that they wouldn't have to do, and all because the doors have been closed to them as a result of their unwillingness to keep quiet about some very basic human truths. They remain unbendable.

I have a heightened respect for Mr. Klima, to boot. For not only does he have the dubious distinction of living for the most part under the burdensome regime of the Czechoslovak Communists, but he is also a child survivor of the genocidal Holocaust. It has always occurred to me to ask him which event he places more of an emphasis on in terms of his defining experience. Both are comprised of an essential gangsterism, but which had more of an impact upon the man?

Minds like Klima's must be saved for the future. We must discover a means of preserving them, but in the meantime I suppose we have his various works and books as a vestige of the craft of this truly gifted Praguer.

Looking forward to getting my hands on another Klima transformational tales.

Hand on the heart,

ADM in Prague

I enjoyed the six stories that were more of a combination of essay and story told in the first person. The Smuggler's Story spoke of censorship and surveillance of the citizenry in the former CSSR while The Courier's Story alluded to the computerized documentation of an ecological disaster. Klima is always on the sidelines providing a commentary that successfully integrates the personal relationships of those he encounters along with an evocative description of the countryside; whether it be rolling hills or the grim desolation of a landscape despoiled by pollution. It is not until the culmination of his stories with The Surveyor's Story, and his longest story, that you begin to have some sense of the proportions of the humiliation suffered by an entire nation for over three decades under Communist rule by an idealistic cadre of its own citizens.