The Guinea Pigs

3.6 stars

The Guinea Pigs is a wild novel about a Czech bank worker who spends large swaths of his days lining up banknotes in the same direction. At home, his family has guinea pigs; he isn't always very nice to them. Or his kids. I enjoyed Vaculík's use of fairy tale motifs, black humor, and absurdity. And the novel's last sentence.

(There's more about The Guinea Pigs on my blog, here.)

This is a delightful, whimsical book, with modest humor and unexpected witticisms on every page: and that is why I couldn't finish it. There is a direct correlation between how delighted I was to read the first page -- the density of the jokes, the continuous stream of quirky humor -- and the speed at which my attention and patience fell off. I stopped reading about halfway through.

What does I mean when an author depends so heavily on eccentric wit? When there is a compulsion to tell every story in a quirky and unexpected manner? When each everyday occurrence is adequately transfigured when it's changed into a slightly odd insight?

There's an anxiety here, something about life, but we'll never know what it is because the author is so show more content to paper everything over with the first clever thing that comes into his mind. It's almost an automatic reflex: he experiences something, the world is about to bear down on him, and he flicks it away with a joke. Everything has to remain rigorously lightweight, offhanded, unserious. Each new experience has to be decorated with his trademark wit so it's domesticated, neutered, ornamented. Clearly he thinks that profundity is best approached by slyly accumulating several thousand harmless witty observations, but it's like spending an evening with someone who laughs at everything and makes jokes continuously. It is exhausting, depressing, dispiriting. Readers who like it might ask themselves why they're so easily pleased, why the world is a puzzle that's so easily solved. show less

When I was a kid I had a guinea pig. It lived in an enormous cage in my bedroom. We kept alfalfa as a treat for it in the hall closet, and whenever someone opened the closet door the guinea pig would start squealing in anticipation. It is hard to describe this sound to those unfamiliar with it, but I will say that it often provoked a double-take among the uninitiated. This behavior on the part of the guinea pig was probably its most interesting attribute. Guinea pigs are not particularly known for their intelligence, or even for their entertaining antics.

As Ludvík Vaculík illustrates with excruciating detail in this novel, what guinea pigs do a lot of is sitting still as if waiting. Waiting to see what will happen next. One does not show more observe much proactivity in the guinea pig. In this novel, guinea pigs are said by some critics to represent the Czech people in the wake of the 1969 Soviet invasion, an act provoked by the Soviet belief that the existing Czech government was straying too far from conservative waters. While Vaculík, a Communist (twice expelled) in favor of increasing liberalization at the time, does sometimes exhibit in his prose a not-very-thinly disguised frustration with his fellow citizens, to treat the book only as a fable about the evils of Soviet Communism does it a disservice.

The storyline follows a bank clerk named Vašek and his family who live a mundane middle-class existence in Prague. The action alternates between Vašek's incongruous dealings with his wife and two sons, and some vaguely sinister goings-on at the State Bank where Vašek works. Bank employees routinely attempt to walk out at the end of the day with a few notes secreted somewhere on their person, occasionally with success but just as often without it. This activity is obscurely linked to an increasing loss of bank notes from general circulation, prompting a shadowy old bank employee to propose the existence of a mysterious parallel circulation. Vašek becomes obsessed with figuring out who is masterminding this operation and why.

When not gumshoeing around in an erratic manner at work, Vašek wanders around his house with a guinea pig in his pocket, doing his computations and berating his sons in an equally erratic manner. Vašek has bought the first of the guinea pigs as a Christmas gift for his younger son Pavel, an event which stirs up the family's previously humdrum life. Suddenly many of their concerns revolve around the guinea pig, which is soon joined by another, and yet another. Of anyone, Vašek becomes the most preoccupied by the presence of guinea pigs in the family home, eventually carrying out a nightly series of arcane experiments on them while the rest of his family sleeps. Vašek is on one hand a delightfully random narrator prone to charming absurdism, while on the other hand he is an unreasonable father and husband and a cold, calculating torturer of guinea pigs. His long-suffering wife Eva, a schoolteacher, is perhaps the most grounded member of the family, though her role rarely rises above that of dispenser of well-placed non sequiturs.

Knowledge of everyday life for the average Czech citizen during Communist control is not required to enjoy this dark and ridiculous novel, though it may enhance one's reading of it. Vašek is a man whose aims and motivations are impossible to pin down, though it's clear he feels a desire to understand what is going on around him. While very little in his life makes sense, he is also an instigator of the nonsensical in his family's life. He is a simultaneous victim and executioner of his own 'normality', a state that is in constant flux. Being that there is some of the erratic in all of us, the contradictions in Vašek's story may seem familiar to anyone, not just those who experienced life under Soviet Communism.

Perhaps the closest Vaculík comes to revealing the true meaning behind his story is when early in the book Vašek shares this thought, following the Ministry of Education's rejection of the article he wrote about his guinea pig:

Writing is always some sort of expression of helplessness or the product of a case of messed-up nerves, disclosing complexes or a bad conscience. The greater the literature, the greater the hysteria, really; think it over. show less

The nearest I can figure is that this novel is about the process of decay and loss of will caused by the tight controls placed on human beings under Communist regimes. The protagonist's experimentation seems to represent the playing with humanity by regimes and an uncaring God. The guinea pigs are the example of how paralyzed and unthinking, how devoid of wishes and dreams, people become when socially, economically, culturally, or otherwise confined. A powerful, thought provoking novel, by an author from the Czech Republic who himself was persecuted and ostracized for the expression of his independent thoughts.

Translated from the Czech by Kaca Polackova

I began reading The Guinea Pigs amused and entertained by the main character, Vasek, a family man who wishes to get his city-bound family back to nature. Since buying a rural cottage is unrealistic, he instead acquires a guinea pig for his family who live in Prague. Vasek appears to be a firm but doting father, and the first-person narration seemed almost sweet at first, as he narrates the story as if telling a child's bedtime story or guide for the care of small animals. Yet as I read, I found an underlying bit of darkness that is revealed more as the book proceeds. In the case of the guinea pig, a gift for his son Pavel, an allusion is made that I missed at first:

“It had all the attributes show more of a good gift…To think of a present like that, a person would first have to be to be really clever and observant; then, he would have to be quick; furthermore, he would have to have a feeling for the rarity of the moment: to know the desire of the recipient, to have a certain feeling towards him and know how to estimate the response. He would have to possess good taste combined with a sense of humor, be profound…He would also have to be a considerate person, not to have bought the weasel.”

It seems at first like good-natured humor, praising his own success with the beloved gift, but the line about the weasel--Who would buy a guinea pig AND a weasel? Knowing that the sweet piglet would be destroyed? Only a sadist would buy both, yet clearly the narrator considered it. A clue.

Vasek works for the state-run banking system in Prague, yet he clearly has no head for numbers: he’s convinced that Edgar Allan Poe was an economist. Worse yet, the bank he works for makes stealing money even more difficult by the day. With the boring job comes an astonishing amount of time left over for theorizing and contemplating all sorts of conspiracies. At work, it appears that a financial meltdown is imminent, yet no one seems to care. One supervisor, an older man who is ignored by most, becomes a focus of Vasek’s daytime speculation.

The nighttime is when Vasek studies the guinea pigs instead, his fascination only increasing daily. Yet while he gets to know his gentle little pets, they somehow end up with mysterious injuries. He is obsessed, and the family branches out to get even more of them. While his children and wife revolve around the periphery of his life, the guinea pigs are his main focus. And strangely enough, the threat of the financial meltdown begins to parallel what is happening with the family pets.

Written by Ludvik Vaculik shortly after the Prague Spring in 1968 (only recently translated to English by Open Letter), the novel is full of symbolism. This is significant because Vaculik was ostracized by the Communist Party for his opinions. It was necessary to speak in riddles or symbols to avoid further persecution. Thus, The Guinea Pigs can be read in more than one way, depending on how you interpret the symbols. For example, even the concept of ‘guinea pig’ goes beyond a small animal, having an additional meaning as a ‘subject for experiment’. Vaculik often suggested that the Czech people were being experimented upon in terms of political power and financial schemes. Even the names given to the guinea pigs owned by Vasek could be considered symbolic (yes, one of them is named “Red”).

Monica Carter explains in her excellent blog, Salonica World Lit, why Vaculik may have chosen guinea pigs to demonstrate the political situation: “if you distill oppression down to its purest form between the oppressor and the oppressed, [it’s] not difficult to imagine an oppressor doling out praise and punishment like some tough but benevolent patriarchal scientist whose only goals are to control and manipulate in order to get the result he wants. Of course he wants them to feel small and vulnerable, dependent and gullible because that's how power works” (the link to her review is below).

At times the symbolism becomes overwhelming, giving the reader moments of both clarity and confusion. At times I thought, “What on earth does this mean? I am clueless!” and other times, “I so know what he means here, I’m so clever.” I found it helpful to refer to the book Prague Panoramas by Cynthia Paces (review coming soon!) to anchor myself in the appropriate time period to understand what was happening in Prague and to see the heavy influence of Russia against the new freedoms that Czech writers were enjoying.

Another way to look at the novel is explored in Lisa Hayden's review (link below), as she ties in the archetypes of Russian fairy tale motifs with parts of The Guinea Pigs. Her review citing Vladimir Propp's work is fascinating.

However, the many allusions to history and politics are lightened by the dark humor that pervades the story. I found myself laughing in surprise at some places and squirming with suspicion in others. It’s not necessary to do history homework to understand the book, it stands alone. But I was curious to understand the story behind the symbolism, and really could see how Vaculik could have been in great danger had he not used the subterfuge. I also enjoyed how it pointed me to other books, including one Poe collection, just to connect the references found in the book to the overall story ("A Descent Into the Maelstrom" to be exact). One of my favorite books so far this year!

Monica Carter’s review:
http://blog.salonicaworldlit.com/2011/05/19/the-guinea-pigs-by-ludvik-vaculik.as...
Lisa Hayden's review (with references to Russian folktales):
http://lisasotherbooks.blogspot.com/2011/05/experimenting-with-life-in-guinea-pi...

Prague Panoramas by Cynthia Paces is published by U of Pittsburgh Press. show less

Translated from Czech, this dark comedy sneaks up on the reader. The narration of begins as if a story is being told to a small child, which was sweetly humorous, but which later started to take on a darker tone as the political symbolism became clearer to the reader. One could make a comparison between the way Vasek studied the family pet guinea pigs and the state's close watch over the citizens of the Czech Republic.

If you like conspiracy theories, behavioral experiments, even if they become vicious, and psychological study, I'd recommend this

The Guinea Pigs is a dark political allegory portraying the essence of life under Soviet rule during the Cold War in Czechoslovakia. The author, Ludvik Vaculik, speaks in riddles, metaphors and symbols to obscure the true meaning of his novel. Vaculik includes a bit of humor to reveal the absurdity inherent in such a regime. It is a daring piece that challenges one intellectually and philosophically. A profound literary work from a powerful Czech voice.