Journey to the South by Michal Ajvaz

 


The Greek island of Loutro, off the southern coast of Crete, serves as the location where a Czech named Martin sits at a restaurant by the sea and relates his tale to a fellow countryman who is also a lover of literature.

Or, more accurately, a series of tales: stories nesting within stories. It begins with Martin recounting his time in Prague, where he witnessed a murder during a ballet based on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The victim was Petr Quas, seated in the front row, and the perpetrator was the Thing in Itself. Does this sound fantastic? It is indeed fantastic, and this is just the warm-up.

Turns out, the ballet was the creation of Tomáš Kantor, Petr's stepbrother. Tomáš was also murdered; he had been stabbed thirteen times in mysterious circumstances while in Turkey, in the sea at the age of thirty-eight. Martin learns all of this from Kristýna, the beautiful young redhead who was Tomáš' ex-lover.

Kristýna goes on to relate the lives of both Petr and Tomáš, including details of the novel Tomáš wrote in his tiny Prague apartment and while working as a train dispatcher in an isolated tower. Tomáš's novel takes place in the imaginary port city of Parca in Southern Europe. At one point, the novel's main character, Marius Sten, sustains a serious injury during a demonstration in the street and is taken by Rita, his girlfriend, to her grandparents' apartment to recover. While there, Marius listens to old Hella as she conveys an elaborate tale created by her husband, Hector, who is, without a doubt, as we come to learn, a phenomenal storyteller.

The setting for Hector's yarn is a Central American country in political turmoil. A war breaks out with its southern neighbor. Enemies of the president kidnap Fernando, his son and a writer, holding him prisoner and isolating him in a shack at the edge of their prisoner-of-war camp in the jungle. Despite being devoid of paper and pen and enduring sweltering heat, Fernando devises a method to write a novel during his captivity. Eventually, the war ends, and although Fernando is never seen again, his novel survives. The way the novel was written and the circumstances of its discovery are truly mind-blowing, serving as a prime example of Michal Ajvaz's high-octane, turbo-charged imagination.

What about the nature of Fernando's novel? Fernando's father and everyone else in the country expected a fictionalized account of his life as a prisoner-of-war. Surprise! Fernando wrote a futuristic science fiction novel, à la Philip K. Dick, about a man named Leo, initially held captive on the top floor of a modernist skyscraper by the svelte daughter of a billionaire. Leo eventually escapes and befriends two gorgeous women - but then comes the shock: they are not human; rather, one is a robot and the other is an immortal daemon. Do you sense a drama clicking into PKD overdrive?  Actually, I found Fernando's novel, retold by Martin in 100 pages, the most compelling and enjoyable part of Journey to the South.



All that I've written above only serves as a quick overview. Michael Ajvaz bestows numerous stunning details upon each story, even as those stories unfurl and spiral into further iterations. For example, we are provided with the history of Parca, tracing back to Roman times and extending through the Renaissance, right up to the present day, with a special emphasis on architecture and a particular movement rooted in antiquity. Another instance involves Linda the robot - her development, the abuse she endured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her eventual flight to freedom.

One Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad the Sailor, Borges, and Calvino all come to mind. From my own reading, I'd like to add Escher's Loops by Serbian author Zoran Živković, a novel modeled after the artwork of M.C. Escher. In point of fact, toward the end of its 600 pages, Martin's mesmerizing tale even makes a direct reference to the famous Belgian illustrator. As I turned the pages, I envisioned Escher's art on several occasions, such as when I read Martin's account of Tomáš musing on his own writing process:

"Tomáš was so fascinated by the voice he was hearing that he knew he would listen to it forevermore. He acknowledged that fate had cracked an excellent joke: Emptiness and what filled it most were one and the same thing. Wrapped up inside it were thousands of stories; in each image and sentence of these stories, other stories were wrapped, in the others yet others, and so on. And the stories didn't just lie there unconcerned - they pushed their way out, demanding to be developed, and that every image, tone, melody, and thought contained within them should be opened out."

The second and concluding part of Journey to the South undergoes a shift to an Odyssey-style adventure, wherein Martin and Kristýna assume the roles of amateur detectives, pursuing clues in their quest to uncover who was responsible for the deaths of the two brothers, Petr and Tomáš. Their travels lead them to Hungary, where they engage in discussions about art, origin, and meaning with the artist József Zoltán. These discussions are primarily centered around his artwork, "Meditating Ant," and his utilization of a symbol that they recognize from the city of Parca in Tomáš's novel. Much like an Escher illustration, signs, symbols, characters, and actions from all the stories become linked and interconnected, thereby prompting the pair to persist in their travels and undertake a more extensive and profound investigation.

I could go on, but I'll stop here. I've posted reviews for Michal Ajvaz' three other novels published in English: The Other City, The Golden Age, Empty Streets. All are marvelous displays of the Czech author's imagination on fire, but I would think many readers would judge Journey to the South his true masterpiece, a novel I can't recommend highly enough.


Czech author Michal Ajvaz, born 1949