SUSAN MIRON
651
who simply couldn't resist the innocently pursed asses of those enticingly
young girls"); at the unavailability of desperately needed equipment like
wheelchairs (a ten-year wait is standard, if the patient hasn't died by then),
the devastating effects of years of toxic industrial pollution (denied or un–
reported), the dull sameness of pre-fab concrete housing, woefully inade–
quate health care, awful food and shoddy clothing (the heroine's ill-fitting
brassieres need to be knotted in the back, and her pants "leap at oppor–
tunities to unzip themselves"); and the truckers passing through her coun–
try who condescendingly see it "as sort of a pigsty." All have the bitter
ring of truth.
Fialka, the novel's sardonic twenty-five year old narrator, realizes
when her closest friend and co-rebel Patrik (both "seekers of truth"
armed with cameras) gets diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (after weeks of
inexplicable impotence), that to get him a wheelchair quickly, she'll need
hard currency. What begins as Fialka's serendipitous, freedom-seeking
one-night stands on the Northern Route frequented by Czech truckers
eager to "capture rainbows" away from the ubiquitous grayness of life,
ends with her switching to the Southern Route with its long-distance
cash-carrying Inter-truckers, where she metamorphosizes overnight into a
highway hooker, a grotesque variation on her once pure-hearted sybaritic
self "Hair a shade too dark to be just the shining color that gets blondes
kidnapped in films, " Fialka initially notes she's the type who "requires
just a little effort in order to look ... a hundred percent more marketable.
Of course I adamantly refused to be marketable." Fialka does, of course,
relent and undergoes a dramatic, depressing makeover - she has plenty of
teenage competition out there on the road . Her creator, however, is
canny enough to realize that both she and Fialka are perfectly marketable
being the free spirit she already is.
Zdenek Urbanek's
On the Sky's Clayey Bottom: Sketches and
Happenings Jrom the Yea rs oj Silence
offers a far more subtle look at Czech
life - its misfortunes and its countless, often silenced victims. Asked to de–
scribe the connecting thread winding through the thirty-six eponymous
"sketches and happenings, " that make up the novel, Urbanek replied that
each reflects "the experience of a freely thinking mind inside a country
which was ... compelled to accept a totalitarian regime." Urbanek's
sketches vary in length from one page to thirty, somewhere between
journalistic reportage and free-floating nightmare, between shattering
pessimism and a desperate attempt to get at "a speck of truth" when
"living in truth" seems an oxymoronic impossibility.
On the Sky 's Clayey
Bottom
is culled from a much larger collection that appeared in two
samiz–
dat
volumes as
Lost Countries
in the 1980s. Many of Urbanek's compressed
sketches read like dramatic monologues; he is a master of ellipsis, irony
