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PARTISAN REVIEW
The second novella, "The Little Town Where Time Stood Still,"
narrated by Maryska and Francin's son, opens eight years later, with
German and Russian soldiers still in Czechoslovakia, and Communism -
which
really
makes time stand still - on its way. "Everything linked with
the old era had fallen anti -clockwise into a slumber." The family - in–
cluding Uncle Pepin with his "lovely ladies, dances and sprees," who
came for a fortnight visit but stays until his piteous death years later, and
his motorbike-loving brother Francin who loses his job when his brewery
is nationalized - weather the assaults of history, aging, and decline into
physical and spiritual decrepitude. Yet through it all there is Hrabal's gift
for bittersweet irony and mordant satire, his Swecz-like photographic hy–
per-sensitivity to nature's marvels, and his ribald humor. Considered both
the most quintessentially "Czech" and most poetic of Czech writers -
hence resistant to translation - Hrabal is blessed to have had James
Naughton as translator of this book.
Do Czech women, like the mythic Clairol blondes, have more fun?
Where do they find the energy for those unbridled, guilt-free sex lives we
read about so frequently in contemporary Czech fiction? Is it
only
Czech
men who concoct these tireless nymphets and ever-ready studs?
Apparently not: the non-stop skirt-chasing and even misogyny that has
for years bedeviled Czech fiction has found its funhouse-mirror image in
Iva Pekarkova's
Truck Stop Rainbows: A Road Novel.
The answer to a publicist's dream, the savvy Pekarkova has garnered
more attention than any other Eastern European novelist in recent mem–
ory. The print media from the glossies to
The Wall Street Journal
and
New
York Newsday
couldn't resist interviewing - and photographing - this
twenty-nine year-old behind the wheel of her New York yellow taxicab
(during night shift, no less). All this diverted attention, however, from her
novel's underlying seriousness. Trained as a biologist, Pekarkova escaped
her homeland in 1985 (hitchhiking, with the help of a British truck driver)
and spent several years in an Austrian refugee camp before settling briefly
in Boston, where she wrote this novel "with a Paper Mate pen over the
course of ten straight weeks." First published in 1989 in Czech by Sixty–
Eight Publishers (a Canadian house specializing in books banned in
Czechoslovakia's communist regime),
Truck Stop Rainbows,
its cover
adorned with a hitchhiking naked angel, is now available and selling
briskly in the Czech Republic. "Perhaps people think it's porn," its au–
thor has quipped.
Far more than that, it is an indictment of myriad aspects of Czech life
under the regime. Pekarkova aims her potshots at public transportation
("sexual transports" described by the locals as "open for gropin' " traveled
by sex-starved "walruses, melancholy older men with St. Bernard eyes,
