Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima
The Tenuous Nature Of Our Safety Nets
From an internationally acclaimed Czech writer comes a shrewd, humane,
and poignant novel, set in Prague before the Velvet Revolution, whose
perceptions about love, conscience, and betrayal cut to the bone of life in
both totalitarian and democratic societies. A chilling story from the
underground.--The New York Times.
Personal Review: Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima
Suppose you spent a lot of your childhood in a Nazi concentration camp,
then got out only to find your country taken over by a lot of idiots with party
cards who proceeded to Orwellize everything. Idiocy became excellence
and excellence just suspicious lack of patriotism. The less you knew, the
more qualified you became. And you wanted to write. What would you
do ? Would you run away ? But what if your language was spoken by
only ten million people in the whole world ? If you left, you'd be read only
in translation--through that glass darkly. Well, you opt to stay. But the
idiots--shall we call them `jerkists' ?---don't want to give you any
recognition. So, you can collect garbage off the streets with a team of
oddball companions and you can assuage your circumscribed little life,

your frustrations in literature by having a steamy affair with a rather
mysterious woman. Ah, but you're married too, with two kids. So, trapped
you are. Isn't almost everyone, everywhere, ultimately trapped in a life
they didn't imagine ? At least they are in our world, where choice is a
possibility.
In a nutshell, this is Klima's autobiography and the dilemma of this strange
but beautiful novel. I couldn't help but recall Milan Kundera here, even if
Klima is probably sick and tired of the comparison. Philosophy plays a big
role, plot takes a back seat. Adultery figures large in both writers' work, as
it does in Skvorecky's as well. I think it is because in 20th century
Czechoslovakia, living meant being in bed with somebody else; you could
never be true to one thing. "Sleeping with the enemy" became a common
metaphor. The enemy could be yourself. Klima writes that "the most
important things in life are non-communicable, not compressible into
words...even though he himself tries to do so." Yes, the whole book
reverberates with the battle between being true to yourself and being true
to the duties you have by being alive, being part of a social fabric,
especially one that is odious to you. I'm not sure the battle is won by the
end. Nor is it lost. It just goes on. Kafka has to appear, Cambodia and
the Khmer Rouge, the philosophy of garbage, and the idea that we are tied
to life by countless threads which form a net for us, but we break them,
others break them, and they slowly rot away, leaving us, at last, alone.
Love must be paramount---it is a strong thread, while garbage is
dangerous, a rotting agent, especially discarded ideas that still hang
around (like Communism in the old Czechoslovakia.) If you read this
novel, you must be interested in such thoughts, Klima's many epigrams,
and his musings on many subjects. You will find a very clear presentation
of the dilemmas of adultery. There are some humorous passages. But it's
most of all the tracing of one man's very human struggle with the givens of
life--marriage, government, authority of any kind, nature, and love---that
will keep you reading to the end. It is not a pop literature novel chockfull of
extremes; it is quiet, but it is brilliant.
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