Slovak.

Schubert, Peter Z.

Gustav Murin. Ako sa ma}. Jan Valter, ill. Bratislava. Illusion. 1998. 245 pages, ill. ISBN 80-967750-4-9.

According to his own note, Gustav Murin wrote Ako sa ma} (How Are You) in Bratislava and Cambridge between 1991 and 1997. Thus he makes obvious not only the lapse of time since 1980, when the events of the novel take place, but also the tremendous changes both in the country and in his own fortunes. The author has won several competitions with his short prose, thus transforming the questing student of the 1980s into a successful author working on his manuscript at Cambridge in the 1990s. Of course, it is impossible to speculate on what turn his life might have taken were it not for the collapse of communism in Slovakia in 1989. As a result, Ako sa ma}, although depicting a very recent past, is in a sense a historical novel.

Much happened to the twenty-two-year-old Bratislava student Matej Daxa in the first nine days of April 1980. It all began with a practical joke on 1 April that attracted the interest of State Security. As a result of this joke, or rather because of the police investigation, he lost the friendship of one of his closest friends. Another one of his buddies attempted suicide, and now plans to escape from Slovakia on release from the hospital. Moreover, Matej was given much unwanted, unfavorable information about his remaining friends, thus possibly losing them all. It was also in those April days that his girlfriend Dada told him about her pregnancy. Matej's unsatisfactory reaction then resulted in Dada's leaving him. And, since he has not been very close to his family for some time, these events left him quite alone. Moreover, a very promising stage in his university studies, indicated on the second day, turned into a very precarious situation a week later.

All this happened in only nine days, between drinking sprees, parties, and various sexual encounters. Each of these action-packed days forms one chapter of the novel. These chapters are then subdivided into screenplay "takes," as the entire text is also conceived as a script for a documentary titled "A Hero of Our Time," in which Matej is cast as the main protagonist. The screenplay takes are introduced and connected by a traditional narrative and interlaced with "memories." The last-mentioned segments explain the past of the characters. It is also from Matej's memories and from data provided to him by his friends that we learn important facts about the background of the characters and their families. This means, for instance, the all-important information under the old regime as to whose parents were expelled from the Communist Party and, even more consequentially, when, and how it affected them and their families.

The work on the documentary is in progress as the novel opens, and a fellow approaching Matej with the question "Ako sa ma}?" spoils the first take. It seems that the documentary has never been completed, and the novel closes with the same young man asking Matej the same question. Of course, the reader knows how the answer, which is not given, has changed over the intervening nine days. What the reader queries, however, is whether Matej really can be considered a hero of his time, or a typical member of the Slovak society of the 1980s, and whether the title of the documentary is an intentional allusion to Lermontov's masterpiece of that name. The events of the first week indicate a definitely positive answer to the first part of the question. Unfortunately, Matej's conduct in the last couple of days changes the reader's view of the hero, and it also seems to take away something from the point of the book, because it is no longer society but the hero who is responsible for his separation. On the other hand, it supplies the loneliness of a romantic hero-but that is probably the closest link the novel has to Lermontov's work. At any rate, the depiction of the first week provides in the eyes of this reviewer both a better picture of the Slovak society of the time and better entertainment, whereas the conclusion is somewhat disappointing. (On recent Slovak writing, see WLT 73:1, pp. 93-96.)

Peter Z. Schubert

University of Alberta

Slovene