Comic Exile in Three Worlds

By Melvin Maddocks

THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS by Josef Skvorecky; translated by Paul Wilson; Knopf; 571 pages; $17.95

In 1968, as the Soviets marched into Czechoslovakia, Josef Skvorecky marched out, heading for Canada. On the way, he ran across his countryman Milan Kundera in Paris. Brooding over the Nazi invasion of their homeland during World War II, the Soviet occupation of the moment and the possibility of exile, Kundera sighed, "There's been too much of everything. How much longer do you think we can last?"

Who could have foreseen a decade ago that the two writers would not only survive their political nightmares but turn them into two of this year's best and most original novels. The Engineer of Human Souls, like Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (TIME, April 16), spins its story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. Yet what emerges is comedy--black, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly Middle European as the despairing wit of Prague's own Franz Kafka. Skvorecky has mixed history with high unseriousness before--notably in The Bass Saxophone, about a Czech youth playing in a German dance band during the war--but his latest work is unquestionably his masterpiece of that modern specialty, the heartbreaking belly laugh.

Skvorecky's alter ego is Danny Smiricky, 48, a Czech emigre professor at a college very like Skvorecky's academic home for some 15 years, the University of Toronto. Danny teaches dark Old World lessons from Poe, Hawthorne and Stephen Crane to nice Canadian boys and girls whose idea of horror is derived from Stephen King movies. As for The Red Badge of Courage, Danny's students read it not as a commentary on war but as one more case study of a young man's identity crisis.

Danny allows himself to be seduced by one of his students in the front seat of her father's Cadillac. Nor does he resist other Western pleasures: an infinity of ice cubes, catsup with French fries and Erroll Garner's piano, the good life, as he sees it.

But the kind of student naivete that would equate a speeding ticket with police brutality causes Danny to abandon his stance of amused tolerance. He retreats to a second demi-world, the "motley, traitorous emigre community." Alas, there the exiles have adopted native customs with a vengeance. The women wear gold boots with green hearts and T shirts with breasts printed on them. The men buy calfskin jackets if they can afford them, checkered suits if they cannot. During their frequent alcoholic binges, they plot absurd schemes for a National Liberation Army of the Czechoslovak People that will overthrow their country's Communist tyrants.

The third world that Danny wanders in, lost, is the past. Of his three worlds, what suddenly seems perhaps the most real to him is the town of Kostelec, where he grew up, in love simultaneously with three girls, dreaming of becoming a hero by sabotaging the factory where he worked as a forced laborer for the Nazis.

Skvorecky handles the young Danny with a gentleness that borders on the romantic, but not for long. Juxtaposed with the bygone scenes of adolescence are contemporary letters to the middle-aged Danny that trickle in from his Kostelec friends. Prema, the young resistance fighter, loses his focus after the war and drifts to Australia, dying a pointless death in a hurricane. Rebecca, the idealist, ends up in a kibbutz, shattered and alone after her son is killed by a bomb in an Israeli cafe. Jan, the poet, remains in Czechoslovakia. Blacklisted into silence, he commits suicide. As a self-described "raconteur of cynical tales," Danny concludes that the only meaning to life is that there is no meaning. "History that repeats itself is a farce" becomes his fancy way of translating Huck Finn's cry from the heart: "I been there before."

Amid this chaos and despair, the professor irrationally hopes. A mad, glorious scene near the end captures Danny's self-contradiction. At a wedding reception in Toronto, the guests become obsessed with recalling gallows-humor stories about a Kostelec hangman who forced condemned prisoners to shave, and shave again until the blood trickled from their chins as they mustered to face their doom. Then he would shout: "Back to your cells, gentlemen. The execution is postponed!"

Meanwhile, the band strikes up. The bride smiles radiantly. The dance goes on, and even as he braces himself to insist that life is simply biology's la ronde, Danny--and certainly Skvorecky--joins in the dance.

What his personal history has cost Skvorecky, only he can measure. But in the process of recording his pain he lends a keen zest to the act of living and writing. So this is what the novel has been! So this is what the novel can still be! Readers for whom contemporary fiction has meant obligatory searches for self-fulfillment or another go-around at suburban malaise may never be the same.

--By Melvin Maddocks