The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation by Elena Lappin
Paul Maliszewski

Elena Lappin, ed. Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation. Catbird Press, 1997. 307 pp. $15.95.

Post- is the prefix of choice for contemporary Eastern Europe. The Czech Republic and other countries are typically said to be postcommunist. Post- defines the present as following the past, which stands to reason, and breaking with the past, which is frequently debatable. Romania might be post-Ceausescu in name, but post- there doesn’t mean left entirely behind.

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno is a fiction anthology of thirteen Czech writers from the generation younger than Milan Kundera, publishing most of them for the first time in English. Calling these writers the post-Kundera generation, while factually accurate, is odd, for one because the man is still alive and writing, and for two because the younger writers are probably more accurately called postcommunist, and I find it disheartening to think of Kundera as only relevant to a world with communism.

But the writers here are clearly post-something. There are enough castles, locked doors, and taciturn guards in this collection to suggest they’re also post-Kafka. A protagonist called “the shop assistant” is familiarly anonymous. In that story the assistant sees “a crowd of tired and peevish people trudging, eyes to the ground.” People everywhere trudge, but in the Czech Republic a crowd with its eyes to the ground arrives with a certain amount of literary weight. There are other characters caught in the circumstances of Kafka too. Vas&Mac255;ek Koubek’s story “Hell,” begins, “Mr. White is an average citizen. Not really happy, but on the other hand not so enlightened that he understands the extent of his unhappiness.”

So why Kafka? Well, boredom, listlessness, inertia, and averageness are the subjects of a number of the stories. Often, as in Kafka, these qualities of life are linked to the major institutions, the job, the school. A character in Michal Viewegh’s novel Sightseers remarks, “The cult of seriousness that rules the Czech Republic is totally incomprehensible.” Often the qualities are environmental, permeating everything. A character describes the world as “very ugly.” “Banality, kitsch, and decay,” he continues “are devouring city, village, and field.”

When Kafka meets postcommunism, there is something like Alexandr Kliment’s novel Boredom in Bohemia: “I had to sign in every morning with a pencil attached to the spine of an attendance book, or punch my card in a time-clock. I wouldn’t say that I was bored really—I can become absorbed in my work and it goes well—but somehow it isn’t the same. A Marxist would say that I am completely free, because I have understood my necessity. I have understood that I have to make a living.” The danger here is that a reader (at least this American reader) can reduce all the stories to political fables. I can read each of them for what they say about “the times.” But the forthright and often ironic ways that these writers introduce politics belie any easy postcommunist conclusions. Or to put this another way, writers are often the most explicit about the thing that is most obvious and least interesting to them, and needless to say many of these authors are very explicit about their country’s communist past. The mention of Marxism in the above quotation is not so much one volley in a political firefight as a way of apprehending the human problems of boredom and dissatisfaction, and finding that way to be disingenuous. Elsewhere in the collection, Jáchym Topol begins a chapter of the novel Sister, “And then one gloomy post-bolshevik day . . .” with what I take to be delicious irony. These younger Czech writers are explicit and cagey about politics the way some American writers find it imperative to be about psychology in the post-Oprah world, in which most everyone daily and freely engages in some amateur psychological supposing. When they write about politics, they do so first and quickly, to get it out of the way and to what lies beyond it. [Paul Maliszewski]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation by Elena Lappin Paul Maliszewski Elena Lappin, ed. Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation. Catbird Press, 1997. 307 pp. $15.95. Post- is the prefix of choice for contemporary Eastern Europe. The Czech Republic and other countries are typically said to be postcommunist. Post- defines the present as following the past, which stands to reason, and breaking with the past, which is frequently debatable. Romania might be post-Ceausescu in name, but post- there doesn’t mean left entirely behind. Daylight in Nightclub Inferno is a fiction anthology of thirteen Czech writers from the generation younger than Milan Kundera, publishing most of them for the first time in English. Calling these writers the post-Kundera generation, while factually accurate, is odd, for one because the man is still alive and writing, and for two because the younger writers are probably more accurately called postcommunist, and I find it disheartening to think of Kundera as only relevant to a world with communism. But the writers here are clearly post-something. There are enough castles, locked doors, and taciturn guards in this collection to suggest they’re also post-Kafka. A protagonist called “the shop assistant” is familiarly anonymous. In that story the assistant sees “a crowd of tired and peevish people trudging, eyes to the ground.” People everywhere trudge, but in the Czech Republic a crowd with its eyes to the ground arrives with a certain amount of literary weight. There are other characters caught in the circumstances of Kafka too. Vas&Mac255;ek Koubek’s story “Hell,” begins, “Mr. White is an average citizen. Not really happy, but on the other hand not so enlightened that he understands the extent of his unhappiness.” So why Kafka? Well, boredom, listlessness, inertia, and averageness are the subjects of a number of the stories. Often, as in Kafka, these qualities of life are linked to the major institutions, the job, the school. A character in Michal Viewegh’s novel Sightseers remarks, “The cult of seriousness that rules the Czech Republic is totally incomprehensible.” Often the qualities are environmental, permeating everything. A character describes the world as “very ugly.” “Banality, kitsch, and decay,” he continues “are devouring city, village, and field.” When Kafka meets postcommunism, there is something like Alexandr Kliment’s novel Boredom in Bohemia: “I had to sign in every morning with a pencil attached to the spine of an attendance book, or punch my card in a time-clock. I wouldn’t say that I was bored really—I can become absorbed in my work and it goes well—but somehow it isn’t the same. A Marxist would say that I am completely free, because I have understood my necessity. I have understood that I have to make a living.” The danger here is that a reader (at least this American reader) can reduce all the stories to political fables. I can read each of them for what they say about “the times.” But the forthright and often ironic ways that these writers introduce politics belie any easy postcommunist conclusions. Or to put this another way, writers are often the most explicit about the thing that is most obvious and least interesting to them, and needless to say many of these authors are very explicit about their country’s communist past. The mention of Marxism in the above quotation is not so much one volley in a political firefight as a way of apprehending the human problems of boredom and dissatisfaction, and finding that way to be disingenuous. Elsewhere in the collection, Jáchym Topol begins a chapter of the novel Sister, “And then one gloomy post-bolshevik day . . .” with what I take to be delicious irony. These younger Czech writers are explicit and cagey about politics the way some American writers find it imperative to be about psychology in the post-Oprah world, in which most everyone daily and freely engages in some amateur psychological supposing. When they write about politics, they do so first and quickly, to get it out of the way and to what lies beyond it. [Paul Maliszewski]

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