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can be said of the alienation that pervades Klima's Prague. As a writer, the
narrator finds that "I had been living in a strange kind of exile for the
previous ten years, hemmed in by prohibitions and guarded sometimes by
visible, sometimes invisible, and sometimes only by guarded watchers....
I was afraid that the silence which surrounded me would invade me, para–
lyze my imagination and kill my plots."
Engulfinent and paralysis, then, are very much what
Love and Garbage
is about. Unable to leave his lover, unable to find fulfillment in his work,
the narrator has no choice but to devote himself to the jetsam of thought
itsel£ Ideas on the essay he is writing on Kakfa in his spare time, consid–
erations of his fellow sweepers and their broken lives, hatred of the
"jerkish" spoken by hacks and bureaucrats, meditations on God and par–
adise, or the lack of both:
all
of these constantly turn themselves over in
the windy passages of the narrator's mind, a lost alley glutted with rubbish
from the world around him, while he must try to make sense of it all as
he tends to his street sweeping and the"cleansing" of his life.
Part fiction, part literary essay, part political and religious tract,
Klima's novel is itself a kind of literary landfill. Throughout, paragraphs
have the quality of someone's pocket notes set loose to the wind, landing
here and there on the page in haphazard fashion, though a kind of sense
remains. What is lacking, however, is a sense of progression. Just as
Skvorecky's whodunit gets bogged down by trying to cover perhaps too
much of history, Klima's refuse pile of meditations gets trampled on by
the narrator's own endless despair. He himself says of Kafka, "By writing,
Kafka not only escaped his torments, but only thus was he able to live at
all.
In his notes, letters and diaries we find that he never tried to put into
words what he thought of literature." At the end of the same paragraph,
however, the narrator does write about literature, observing, "Literature
without those who receive it is nonsensical anyway, as would be a world
where no other language was heard than jerkish, where language could
no longer make anyone respond, not even someone above human be–
ings."
In
fact, it's hard to feel that Klima's narrator, unlike Kafka, ever
escapes his torment. There is, of course, no reason that he should in order
for the book to be successful, but given the entrenched alienation he ex–
periences, as well as how interior his world remains, it can be difficult for
readers to feel as if the novel is really speaking to them.
George Konrad leans toward the same use of arbitrary fragments as
Klima in
A Feast in the Garden,
if not more so, for rather than merely
jumping from paragraph to paragraph, his sensibility refracts reality
through the prism of each new sentence. Even more than the above
works, Konrad's novel is a sprawling web of consciousness, his narrator
David Kobra stating, "Communication in this book will remain in that
