The Achievement of Josef Skvorecky ed. by Sam Solecki (review)

HUMANITIES 251 Sam Solecki, editor, The Achievement of Josef Skvorecky University of Toronto Press. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper In the introduction to The Achievement of Josef Skvorecky, Sam Solecki explains that, although the publication of the volume coincided roughly with Skvorecky's retirement from the University of Toronto, the book is not meant as a festschrift in the traditional sense but as 'a broadly initial introduction' to the author's work. This collection of essays is in fact both: it presents an impressive array of perspectives on Skvorecky's oeuvre, but it also does so in a warmly celebratory mood. This book is a generous homage, and therefore not the place to find fault with the author's endeavours. Jan Kott captures the general spirit perhaps best when he pinpointsvarious apparent narrative weaknesses in The Engineer ofHuman Souls, only to remind himself each time 'That the author was right.' And indeed there is much to celebrate. If, to some Canadian readers, Skvorecky is mostly the author of the controversial The Engineer ofHuman Souls (the first work in translation to receive the Governor-General's Award, as Peter Petro reminds us), this volume goes some way to correct this truncated picture, devoting essays to each of the important works, carefully placing them within their often complex literary context. Thus, George Woodcock relates The Engineer of Human Souls to the tradition of Turgenev's political fiction in Virgin Soil and Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, as well as drawing a bold parallel with Margaret Laurence's epic fiction. Helena Koskova and Joseph N. Rostinsky discuss Miss Silver's Past as an anti-communist variation of the detective novel that, as a form of escape literature, violates the prescriptions of Stalinist ideology for socially relevant art. Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz's virtuoso review of Dvorak in Love sums up Skvorecky's multiple heritage most impressively: in a collage of reviews of Dvorak in Love ranging from the London Observer and the Toronto Globe and Mail to the Sydney Morning Herald and New York Magazine, Goetz-Stankiewiez parades a chorus of voices variously addressing literary, anthropological, sociological, historical, musicological , and even plain readerly concerns, each 'trying to cope ... with the fact that the novel is a treasure house' at all of these levels, 'held together by the author's artistic vision, wide learning, and knowing humour.' While the book extensively documents Skvorecky's indebtedness to Western authors, genres, and disciplines, it is also careful to point out that the exigencies of a totalitarian regime and those of an emigre existence will radically affect the meaning of such models. As Sam Solecki points out in 'Some Notes on Reading Josef Skvorecky in America,' in the individual sign - say, the Czech word demokracie - the signifier or acoustic image has stayed the same but the signified - the referent or content - has been emptied and replaced by the Soviet equivalent, which, 252 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 because it differs denotationally and connotationally from the Czech, changes the entire meaning of the sign.' Nowhere could this gap between text and meaning be more apparent than in the translation of Skvorecky's work, especially of The Engineer of Human Souls, the humour of which greatly depends on the sometimes baroque melange of Czech and English spoken by its immigrant characters. To a Canadian reader who has no knowledge of Czech, the nuances of this language will not be accessible, but a Czech unfamiliar with North American English will also miss the point. Even from the brief sampler which Peter Petro offers in his analysis of Paul Wilson's otherwise accomplished translation of The Engineer of Human Souls, it is apparent that the English version projects a first-person narrator who is much more self-satisfied than his Czech counterpart, an effect which may well have contributed to the book's mixed reception in Canada. This conflict between two different readerly responses is played out on a larger ideological scale in contributions such as Milan Kundera's 1978 Preface to the French edition of Mirtikl. In accusing 'Western intellectuals, with their proverbial self-centredness' of 'tak[ing] an interest in events not in order to know them but...