My Golden Trades

I enjoyed the six stories that were more of a combination of essay and story told in the first person. The Smuggler's Story spoke of censorship and surveillance of the citizenry in the former CSSR while The Courier's Story alluded to the computerized documentation of an ecological disaster. Klima is always on the sidelines providing a commentary that successfully integrates the personal relationships of those he encounters along with an evocative description of the countryside; whether it be rolling hills or the grim desolation of a landscape despoiled by pollution. It is not until the culmination of his stories with The Surveyor's Story, and his longest story, that you begin to have some sense of the proportions of the humiliation suffered by an entire nation for over three decades under Communist rule by an idealistic cadre of its own citizens.

One of the hardest sources of literary material to find here in the Golden City of Prague, I've lately discovered, is a wealth of good translated dissident writing into the English language that's of a certain calibre of quality. To be sure, there's heaps of translated dissident writing in the marketplace which exists. I know places where I can peruse shelves of samizdat press, shelves and rows and rows of it. Some of it poorly translated, some of it not translated at all. In Ivan Klima's case, I'm impressed by the tenacity with which the man has worked to make his material more widely-read. He wants to leave a certain legacy, and he doesn't want us to forget that life in this halcyoned poor facsimile of Masaryk's First Czechoslovak Republic (so very poor, but that, too, is a learning experience) isn't all that once was...is isn't all about the cheap lifestyle, the easier (although less so than previously) women, and the tasty beer. There was a time that people lived in mortal fear of the common denizens of this land, and its gatekeepers, and where the mere act of stepping outside your home, regardless of the weather, meant that you were taking a giant leap into the unknown. Buying bread might've even been construed by the authorities as an act against the so-called "People," and Klima was the protagonist in many of these so-called farcical tragedies, such was the theatrical equivalent of these day-to-day experiences during the forty-year repugnant reign of the Czechoslovak brand of "Communism." When a great nation in the middle of Europe lost its way. When the memory of a man who worked hard for the majesty of the Bohemian and Moravian and Slovakian spirit was quashed. These aren't your run-of-the-mill types of short tales, either, gentleman and ladies. They're well-crafted and earthy, and they don't always have nice neat little bowties, either. They terminate on the occasional corkscrew and believe me, it'll get you thinking about things in ways that you haven't before. More generally, I've begun a gradual gravitation away from all things nice and neat in Storyland, towards more "minor"-ending sorts of yarns. The author maintains enough respect for you and his other readership that he doesn't want to prejudice your thinking and give too much away at any time. There's too much gold at stake in attempting to hijack your delicate conscience with his own fancied conclusions, however just they may ostensibly be...Klima rather posits that better *you* bring your life experience to bear on what may have happened to these various delicious protagonists. You tell me, Klima seems to be beckoning. *You* give me the straight goods. Tell me how it affected you, he says. I'm not going to do it for you. Is this an essential stylistic difference between North American and European writers? I dunno...styles are being challenged and trounced all the time in the 21st-century. I've heard many times about the death and resurrection of the classic form of the no

The sextet of stories presented in this volume are all variations on the theme of work; the "golden trades" of the title represent the employment choices made by the artists of Czechoslovakia in the last decade of communism. This is indeed "mature communism" in its death throes, its last gasp, for as the narrator approaches each of his trades - archeology assistant, courier, engine driver among them - we expect to find a man beaten-down by a society; instead, the artist is triumphantly liberated through the very simplicity of his work. Klima masterfully portrays a man (perhaps himself) at relative peace with his predicament, a man who regrets the course that his country has taken but who nonetheless is able to connect with his fellow man - indeed, with the world - through his everyday jobs. There is the engine driver who blissfully rushes along in his locamotive, flying past the flat-footed police; there is the courier who travels around Prague with nothing more than a leather satchel slung over his shoulder and, in perhaps the best story, there is the surveyor's assistant who achieves an enduring sense of freedom in the lines, angles and boundaries of the countryside. Ivan Klima presents tales of a man forced by the State to wear the clothes of a trade, but a man who retains his artist's soul.