490
PARTISAN REVIEW
whether after four hundred pages it's enough to simply say that "life
is
a
bad whodunit," and then run the risk of the book appearing to be
the
same. For, in fact, the weakest aspect of
The Miracle Game
is its plot,
the
meal ticket of good detective fiction. Too often Skvorecky rambles
in
his
narrative, jumping from the mystery of the supposed "miracle" in 1948,
to the hysteria and excitement of the Prague Spring of 1968, then back to
Danny's earlier romance with one of his students when he was a teacher
in Hronov, where the "miracle" occurred, then off to America in 1970 to
muse about the failure of the Czech revolt. In between he provides a
smattering of the many tragedies that occur amid the political tunnoil, but
in covering so many, they have a tendency to cancel each other out. The
result can be that the reader comes to feel like Danny when he notes that
"I suddenly felt as though I were watching a Shakespearean drama per–
formed by the Hronov Puppet Theatre," all sense of weight and depth
having disappeared from the characters.
This no doubt corresponds to the senselessness and lack of meaning
that must have pervaded the nightmarish years spent enduring the cruelty
of puppet regimes, as well as the lack of an informed purpose and direc–
tion experienced even more recently. However, the passages on young
Danny's troubled romancing of the ingenue Vixi are the book's most
vivid. In these we know Danny best through his irrepressible ardor, and
Vixi provides a lively and playful presence that is often lacking elsewhere.
When Danny is in the present all seems drab and dreary, broken and cor–
rupt, as it no doubt was. But so, too, does the novel, whenever it gets lost
in rambling around the spook house of history. Everywhere ghouls and
goblins jump out from the shadows, but often at the expense of the nov–
el's little train seeming to have gone off track.
Similarly, halfway through Ivan Klima's
Love and Garbage,
the narrator
exclaims, "I am not going back and I am not going forward, I am stand–
ing in a void, I am standing between two fields, at the meeting point of
two calls which intersect each other, I am nailed to the cross, how can I
move?" Though this refers specifically to the narrator's inability to choose
between his psychiatrist wife Lida and his sculptress lover Daria, it's also a
lament about the stasis of life in Czechoslovakia under the old regime, as
well as the dead end in which the narrator finds himself as a writer in a
society that will not allow his work to be published. Hence, if only to see
life from another side, the narrator decides to become a street sweeper,
cleaning up the rubbish of Prague while also sorting the rubbish of his
own confusion and despair.
"Rubbish is immortal," thinks the narrator, "it pervades the air, swells
up in water, dissolves, rots, disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke,
into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it." The same
