Home » Czech Republic » Alexandr Kliment » Nuda v Cechach (Living Parallel)
Alexandr Kliment: Nuda v Cechach (Living Parallel)
Alexandr Kliment
was one of those wCzech writers who opted to remain in Czechoslovakia after the events of 1968. As we shall see this is very relevant to this novel.
Both the title and the opening chapters give us an idea of what is happening in this book. Living Parallel refers to the idea of exile, which means escaping from the horrors of communism and leaving a country that you love, for all its faults .
There is something of a second meaning though and that concerns should you be with this person or that person and that is very much a complicated issue in this book.
In the opening of the book, we learn that our hero, Mikuláš Svoboda, is considering going into exile to Paris with Olga, the woman he loves. The year is 1967, and he is approaching his fortieth birthday. She is an artist so we can see the attraction to her of moving to France. However, he is an architect and he works in the government designing hideous Soviet style high rise buildings which he does not enjoy. The building buildings he would like to design he is not allowed to do so. They are buildings which are in harmony with nature and are buildings in which people would want to live rather than have to live in.
We move back a long way to when they first met. He is travelling on a train. As the train slows down at a level crossing and station he sees a woman in a vehicle at the level crossing and is immediately attracted to her. When the train slows down at the station, he jumps off but by the time he gets to the level crossing she has gone and and so has has the train. It was the last train of the day so he has a three hour walk to his destination. He is going to to a rectory. When he was young, he was a committed Christian, but later he will renounce his faith.
At the rectory he meets Stepan, a priest whom he knows and a woman who is serving. He does not yet know but she is the woman he saw from the train and she is Olga.
Olga we will learn, has grown up withVaclav, and when they were still children Stepan, he performed a fake marriage for them and later when they were old enough and Stepan a qualified priest, they have a proper wedding.
Vaclav is a horse breeder and has been very successful at it and continues to do so. Olga is studying painting in Prague and travels there regularly. On her visits to Prague, she meets up with.Mikuláš and it is clear that both are very much attracted to one another but nothing happens. They remainyour good friends.
But then it all goes wrong for Vaclav. He is doing well, too well, and the communist do not like that. Then the plague strikes the horses, they have to be shot, but the authorities claim thatVaclav is responsible. He is arrested and eventually sent to work in uranium mines. He eventually escapes and turns up at the rectory in really bad shape. He survives a day or two and then dies. A kindly communist official lets aOlga bury him in their orchard.
Olga and Mikuláš drift apart and both marry someone else both marriages end in divorce.Mikuláš remains on good terms with Jarmila, his ex, a translator, not least because he feels somewhat guilty that he married her when he was in love with somebody else.
Inevitably, the couple run into one another again.
I have been in love with you from the first moment I saw you,” I said.
“Why didn’t you ever say it?”
“Was it necessary?” I asked. We of course we knew that he had been in love with her from the beginning.
He is at that stage in his life when he feels he has achieved nothing. He looks at the high-rise buildings he helped design and is ashamed. But it is now 1967 and things are changing. His boss lets him bring out a previous project that he had designed and had been rejected and he was quite excited about the idea. So when Olga proposes they flee to Paris he had mixed feelings. There is a reason for his hesitation.. He loves his country. In quite a few Czech novels that I have read which are set in or around Prague, the author/lead character extols the city, its monuments, its churches and often as well the countryside around Prague. Mikuláš is no exception to this. He loves his city and its surroundings.
He comments I have produced nothing and I have experienced nothing special. I would say, if you’d like, as part of my balancing, that all I’ve done is live, and that I’ve lived and still live in a specific place. Why should I apologize for that?
Much of the rest of the book, which is, frankly too verbose, he wonders whether it is the right thing to do to leave with Olga. Should he staynow’ things seem to be easing politically in the country and he may even get his project approved. He even manages another affair this time with a woman he meets at the left luggage office at the station, whom he calls a uggagette and whose name is Miladka. She is divorced and by coincidence, divorced from the communist official who helped them buryVaclav.
We follow his discussions with his boss, Dr Rychta, who is sympathetic and with the three women in his life.We learn briefly about his brother who was arrested and imprisoned and on release, kept trying to commit suicide so is now interned in an asylum. Above all we learn about his inner torment, about the decisions he has to make and finds difficult to make. Where do his loyalties lie? He himself is unsure and struggles with it.
Publishing history
First published in 1978 by 68 Publishers
First published in English in2001 by Catbird Press
Translated by Robert Wechsler