15 August 2015

Review #300: Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street by Heda Margolius Kovály, Alex Zucker (Translation)



My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Innocence is a kind of insanity” 


----Graham Greene, an English novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenplay writer, travel writer and critic



Heda Margolius Kovály was a Czech writer, whose book, Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street was inspired by her own life in early 1950s Socialist Prague—her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace, thus penning a political thriller cum detective novel, that is translated into English by Alex Zucker, an award winning translator.






Synopsis:

1950s Prague is a city of numerous small terrors, of political tyranny, corruption and surveillance. There is no way of knowing whether one’s neighbor is spying for the government, or what one’s supposed friend will say under pressure to a State Security agent. A loyal Party member might be imprisoned or executed as quickly as a traitor; innocence means nothing for a person caught in a government trap.

But there are larger terrors, too. When a little boy is murdered at the cinema where his aunt works, the ensuing investigation sheds a little too much light on the personal lives of the cinema’s female ushers, each of whom is hiding a dark secret of her own.

Nearly lost to censorship, this rediscovered gem of Czech literature depicts a chilling moment in history, redolent with the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Communist Czechoslovakia.



From the title of the book, it is very clear that the book is divided into two parts- Innocence and Murder on Steep Street. Well, but from the synopsis, it sounds like a murder/espionage style of thriller, although that's the half of it. The larger picture of the story lies in the 1950s Prague especially the period when Prague was under the Communist rule when marking anyone, who goes beyond the government by either speaking evil in the name of government or participating in any ploy against the government or even if you have not done anything, as "dissident" and by punishing them by putting them on life imprisonment. The author, herself, was a victim of this era, and telling this personal story brings alive those gruesome vivid details of the period with a sharp, raw voice in this part-thriller-part-historical-fiction novel.

So while reading especially while reviewing this book, please do not take this book as a mystery novel even for a single bit, since it doesn't only contain a mystery that unravels in an nontraditional manner but also it is hidden under multiple layers of history, which is indirectly proportional to the murder mystery.

Helena Nováková gets a job as an usher at the Horizon Cinema in Prague, when her husband was imprisoned for espionage. Helena too herself is under suspicion and the government put spies around her to keep eyes on her activities. Helena is ripped apart by the choices of whether to save the life of her beloved by risking hers or whether to let go. The first half of the story tells the readers about how innocent lives were torn apart by the Communist government, how each one fought against not will against the government but also against their souls to protect themselves from the government who terrorized the whole nation. The insightful picture that the author sketched during this period of Communist Prague is of the want of freedom against the victimization towards mortality without guilt.

The second half opens with the murder followed by a drastic change of narrative from first person POV of Helena to third person POV of other key characters while Helena takes the back seat. This time the author narrated about the murder where the victim is an unidentified person, I mean the author deliberately kept the identity under wrap and since the murder took place right in front of the Horizon Cinema, all the employees are under the probable suspect list. This part sees the entry of yet another brilliant character of this book, Vendyš, a police detective who too being honest, is a victim of political corruption and tyranny of this communist government.

The story from the second half takes an 180 degree turn of being stead to being fast paced and the way the author teased her readers with the mystery by throwing little hints and turns at the beginning to totally throwing the readers off their edges by introducing unexpected twists, definitely puts the book into an intriguing page turner category. The writing style is one of a kind- purely honest and sheerly engaging. The story builds up like a maze- when the reader thinks he found the way, is actually the time when he falls deeper into this mystical puzzle.

The book has this much amount of unexpected hidden twists and turns that it is enough to kill the readers with anticipation. The author never once openly or positively talked about the mystery, since she keeps on introducing one new suspect after another and the way she addresses each one of them is another complex thing that urges the readers many a times to look what they read before one particular chapter. The book feels like walking in the mist, you can see the light yet you can't reach it without proper direction.

Although for die-hard thriller fans, the climax might come as a disappointing shock since the author wrapped it up in a rather different way than it happens in a regular thriller novel. So be prepared for the climax- not something too satisfying yet something that completely justifies the overall story.

The timeline as well as the backdrop is surprisingly very striking. Since the story is a personal one, so each and every details comes alive in this book since the author had portrayed the backdrop in an intricate fashion and it also seems like she had an eye for tiniest of tiny details that finally reproduces a brilliant background for this story. Teleport would be the wrong word to describe how I felt while reading this novel, instead I would stress on the fact that I was instantly time traveled to yet another remarkable yet painful era in our history in a completely different yet beautiful land called Prague.

This novel is a brilliant example of something very challenging that engages each and every brain cells of the readers to contemplate in their own way and also of something which is thoroughly insightful enough to show the readers a dark picture of the reality as well as of the human souls.

Verdict: In one word, a must read, only if you can handle complexities and multi layers in a plot.

Courtesy: Thanks to the publishers for giving me an opportunity to read and review this book. 
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Author Info:
Heda Margolius Kovály, a Czech writer and translator, was born in 1919 in Prague to Jewish parents. In 1944 she and her family were taken to Auschwitz. Her parents were immediately killed, but Heda managed to survive by getting selected for a work detail. After escaping from a transport to Bergen-Belsen, she was reunited with her husband, who had survived Dachau and become a devout Communist. In 1952, he would be tried for conspiracy and killed in a Czech jail.

Under a Cruel Star, Kovály's memoir of her time in Auschwitz and the early years of Czechoslovak communism, was first published in 1973. It has since been published in many languages all over the world. Her crime novel, Innocence, is based in large part on her own experiences in early 1950s Prague. Kovály died in 2010 at age 91.

Alex Zucker has translated novels by Czech authors Jáchym Topol, Miloslava Holubová, Petra Hulová, and Patrik Ouredník. Honors he has received include an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, an NEA Literary Fellowship, and the ALTA National Translation Award. In 2014 he did new subtitles for the digitally restored version of Closely Watched Trains, the 1966 Czechoslovak New Wave classic based on the Bohumil Hrabal novella. Alex lives in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.


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1 comment:

  1. It's always difficult to live in a political period, especially where everyone is suspicious of each other. Having a book set in this time must be so interesting!

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