A middle-aged woman, still beautiful but aware of no longer being young, mourns her dead marriage and despairs over the behaviour of her increasingly estranged teenage daughter. Kristyna, a dentist born on the day Stalin died, carries her misery like a physical burden. Her life appears to have contracted into a routine that consists of dealing with patients, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes and being depressed in the grand, questioning style. While her ex- husband, the love of her life who betrayed her, waits alone for death in his flat, Kristyna worries about her recently widowed mother as well as her daughter. Mainly, however, she frets about herself, her depression, her loneliness, her lack of love, her increasingly vulnerable beauty, and her past.
Ivan Kl∅ma, one of the most sympathetic and humane of novelists, has always dealt brilliantly with the hardship of ordinary life in his native Prague. Yet this novel, told through a series of monologues offered by the central characters, is dreary and never fully engages, largely due to the characters, an unhappy assortment of self-absorbed, whingeing individuals. Considering that characterisation has always been the strength of Kl∅ma's candid fiction, the weakly drawn characters here disappoint. The story itself, with its balancing of contemporary life against a past still complicated by the war and a history of communism, lacks urgency.
The "life is appalling, people are vile" narrative, dominated by Kristyna, whom no one could possibly warm to, appears half-hearted. The opening sequence, in which she laments her depression, not only fails to compel, it fails to convince and sets the complaining tone of much of the book. There is a hollow ring to her litany of despair. This is curious. Kl∅ma has never before had difficulty in making even the most irritating of characters appear real. Here is a woman who regards herself as a failure as a daughter, a wife and a mother, but her torment seldom rises above irritation.
Any felt pain is rooted in what she sees as the betrayal of love and her inability to hold on to an older man, "my former and only husband", who had been divorced twice before she married him. Kl∅ma has attempted to make No Saints or Angels as real as his fiction usually is. This time he fails. Kristyna's mind is as dull as her life. Her relationship with her father emerges as the cloudy explanation for the woman she became.
As a young girl she took to drinking, smoking, drugs and men as a form of rebellion. Her home life was distorted by her father's presence. In death, however, his story takes shape through the form of a diary. In it, Kristyna discovers her father's other life. But it is all too thinly handled, as is her relationship with her kindly mother and the singing star sister she barely knows.
In the midst of Kristyna's unconvincing apathy she meets up with a young man, a former student of her ex-husband. A stilted romance develops, about which nothing convinces. There are long passages of remembered conversations about being young and time with her once magnificent former husband. The boy lover is shallow and unreal. His form of relaxation is fantasy games. He attempts to introduce Kristyna to a group of friends some two generations removed from her - with predictable results.
In addition to all of this is the problem with her young daughter, not yet 15 and involved with drugs and sex. Jana's sequences, possibly because of the translation, are little more than forced efforts at creating a teen-speak.
Her behaviour, which seems to be a repeat of her mother's in her younger days, never moves beyond a clichΘd portrait of youth culture. There is no sense of an individual in crisis. In fact, none of the characters is interesting, none is real. The dialogue is flat and wooden, as is the prose. Also disappointing is the lack of any sense of Prague.
In his finest novel, Judge on Trial (1986; English translation 1991), Kl∅ma demonstrates how good he is at describing people in crisis, particularly emotional crisis. In that novel, the central character, Adam Kindl, not only suffers the turmoil of dealing with a wife and mistress, but his wife also embarks on a doomed relationship with a younger man who believes true love is only experienced at a dramatic price. Earlier, in the excellent Love and Garbage (1986, English translation), he handles the ordinary with flair, sensitivity and understanding. But this time, the narrative is weary, flat and dogged by self-consciousness, as devoid of hope as the characters, who neither engage nor convince.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
