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Loading... Year of the Frogby Simecka (otherwise under Martin M. Simecka)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. One of my favourite books of recent memory. The story concerns Milan, a young man banned from college in Bratislava by the communist authorities because of his father's politics. Milan engages in a series of dead end menial jobs in hospitals and shops, witnessing firsthand the depressing fragility of humanity and scarcity of moments of beauty in 1980s Slovakia. He finds his own beauty in his girlfriend Tania and his love of running, both of which provide the book with a radiance, but also with its true moments of fear, when it looks possible that he may lose one or the other. Breathtakingly simple, bleakly depressing and beautifully moving on occasions, Milan's thoughts and actions are largely unremarkable, but his search for beauty on the claustrophobic streets of his home town is sad and wonderful in equal measure. One of my favourite reads of this year, without a doubt. How I wish I could like this book! The author is born in my hometown of Bratislava, at almost the same time as I. He describes surroundings I have walked; his characters have names I am familiar with; they are unmistakably Slovak. The book has an introduction by Vaclav Havel, and blurbs from reputable critical sources. And yet...the book just falls flat. The protagonist is dull. The situations he finds himself in are yawn-inducing. The plot is totally predictable. And the prose is painful. “Passion is a gift, wherever it comes from, and attracts me so strongly perhaps because I have never felt its destructive power. A wave of passion could never wash away those sober thoughts that corrode the brain like poison. Now she was flowing into me through the hot tenderness of her mouth; she was addressing me with the desperate, merciless pressure of her perfect teeth.” (171) Ouch! And this is interspersed with passages of philosophising, with not a spark of originality. The book does show life in Czechoslovakia under communism but there are much superior books, in Czech, showing that much more vividly, with Salivarova’s Summer in Prague just one of many examples. 0.020 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 068481367X, Paperback)Set in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s, Martin Simecka's stunning first novel, The Year of the Frog, portrays a young man struggling to come to terms with his circumstances in the last days of communist dictatorship. Milan, the son of a former party official now imprisoned for dissident activities, is barred from the university despite the fact that he is a brilliant student and an extraordinary runner. Forced to work, Milan takes a series of menial jobs -- first as a surgical orderly in a hospital, next as a clerk in an under-stocked hardware store, lastly as an assistant in a maternity hospital for both births and abortions -- all of which serve to break open his life.Two great passions save him from the bleakness of his everyday existence: long-distance running, and his love for Tania, a beautiful university student from whom he seeks salvation and ultimately marries. The Year of the Frog is a coming-of-age story, a romance, and a novel which poses important questions about life and death, about love and freedom, faithfulness and infidelity. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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