BOOKS
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and truth, although all these words are just part of one infinite thing that I
seem to skirt without actually seeing."
Wisdom and love exist everywhere in Berberova's passionate and
moving fiction. Chekhovian in its sense of nuance and irony, Tolstoyan
in its ability to touch the purity of hope and despair without becoming
sentimental, her work marks a last installment in the great line of nine–
teenth-century Russian literature, but one that has been transposed to the
harsher plots of the near past. Because of her sweep and control,
Berberova rises above the sorrow she is forced to depict, and it is this de–
fiant sense of nobility and human worth that best characterizes her vision.
At the end of "In Memory of Schliemann," the book's final novella, set
in 1984, the narrator states, "What amazed me about that vision was its
conjunction of horror and beauty .. . something I had lived with, some–
thing I had grown used to, something I had made peace with, I think."
Here, as elsewhere, one hears the voice ofBerberova herself, humane and
masterly to the end.
Though Josef Skvorecky's impish protagonist, Danny Smiricky, has
been a humane, if not deliciously comic presence in previous novels such
as
The Cowards
and
The Engineer of Human Souls, The Miracle Game
shows
his character growing a bit thin in Skvorecky's effort to set the novel in
the Czechoslovakia of 1948, 1968, and the 1970s, all at the same time.
The central event that bridges the different eras is the mysterious move–
ment of a statue of St. Joseph during a priest's sermon in a small country
church. This takes place in 1948, just after the Communists have come to
power. Danny happens to witness the event, though not quite com–
pletely, because he's catnapping during the service. Years later, however,
he still finds himself caught up in the mystery of whether or not it was a
genuine miracle, a Communist ploy to discredit the church, a cruel hoax
that led to the priest's death by torture, or all of the above. In between,
Danny continues his familiar lusty pursuits, proving, as a character says of
him,
that he remains "a human boy-child among the comrades."
And so, too, Skvorecky. His has always been an aesthetic of the
comic and the ribald surviving in the face of the lethal and dour machina–
tions of tyranny. His fondness for detective fiction also keeps weighty
matters of historical outrage afloat on a bubble of suspense, though loose
ends never quite get tied up in neat resolutions. Rather, mystery and ab–
surdity resolve themselves into just that - more mystery and absurdity.
.. Life is a whodunit and the perpetrator is truth," thinks Danny towards
the end of the novel. "It's a bad whodunit. The perpetrator always gets
away."
All of this is well and fine as musings about the absurdity of life under
the duress of an absurd society. The question that rises, however, is
