Three Novels: Hordubal, An Ordinary Life & Meteor

For the reader only familiar with Capek as an early "science fiction" writer (e.g., R.U.R and War With the Newts) the narrative and literary qualities of this trilogy, as well as the differing authorial voices and tones spread across the three short novels, will probably come as quite a surprise. Capek's reputation as a twentieth century novelist should rest as firmly on this work as well as on the above-mentioned better-known play and novel (i.e., they are better known to their English-translation readers; as for Czech readers and readers in other languages, I cannot say. It is quite possible that the trilogy is considered there to be the peak achievement of his career.) Here is a brief summary of the stories. Hordubal: Think of the memorable character Moosbrugger from Musil's Man Without Qualities, but a very benign Moosbrugger rather than a psychotic one. That is, we have the story of an uneducated, illiterate man - a farmer become miner become farmer again -- who wishes for very little and in spite of his diligence and good intentions cannot get even that. As a result of his prolonged absence he has become a lost soul - the townsmen, his wife, and his daughter are now strange to him, and he is strange to them. The language and style do justice to the confusion, turbidity and fluctuations of his thinking. There is a murder and a solution of the crime, with some entertaining policemen's by-play. I will not reveal who did it or why, or whether the punishment meted out is just. Meteor: Years before most readers or viewers had been exposed to the multiple point-of-view retelling of a story, as in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet or the film Rashomon, Capek did it and did it well in this novel. A man is dying in a hospital after a plane crash. Absolutely nothing is known about him. Three hypothetical reconstructions of the man's life are recounted: one by his caretaker, a nun-nurse who gleans her story from disturbingly real dreams; one by a patient who is a clairvoyant; and one by another patient who is a poet. Somehow, although different in their details, all three stories converge (while making sense of the history of the man's diseases and accidents that is inferred by his physicians.) But is this three-fold version of his life a true one, or merely one based on convenience, self-consistency and the need for something instead of nothing, for pretending to have knowledge rather than professing an unbearable ignorance? I won't tell you (because I don't know.) An Ordinary Life: Very ordinary, and a touch poetic. A retired train station-master of the old Habsburg Imperial realm and the new Czechoslovakian republic spends his last weeks on earth writing his own biography, although he thinks that such an ordinary life is perhaps not worthy of the effort. But he is close to death and wishes to memorialize goodness and steadfastness, so he goes ahead, creating a loving homage to his parents and to the small country

No wonder this book is called the Noetic Trilogy because it is all about what we can or can't know. For that reason, the book is short on answers but rich in speculation. I think the 'may-have-beens' of life was what made Capek tick. Consider the plots: Hordubal: A miner returns from America, finds out his wife no longer loves him, gets killed. Investigations lead to no clear conclusion but speculations abound. The story is a perfect antidote to Sherlock Holmes who always cracks any problem by the power of cold logic. Reading Hordubal, you realize sometimes the only thing you can do is shrug your shoulders and keep wondering. Meteor: A plane crashes in the fields, the pilot lies in coma in the hospital, no ID found, no other indication except for a few coins in his pockets. The whole story is really a series of speculations about who this pilot fella was, where he was from. There is a doctor, a writer, a nun - each makes up his/her own story about the pilot with varying degrees of detail and realism - and you, the reader, will think: 'Now the author lets me in on how things really happened...' TOUGH LUCK! It remains an enigma and you better learn to live with it. Ordinary life: This guy is looking back at his own life trying to figure out who he really was: a hero, a coward, a bureaucrat, a poet? Who knows? Who can tell if even the guy who lived his own life is unsure? Notice: I gave away the 'plots'. For many books, that ruins it for you. Not with these Three Novels. For while in those other books the point of reading them is to FIND OUT how things happened, in Capek's Three novels, the point is to make you writhe from uncertainty. And Capek is a good author, so you will.

What can we know? But the deeper question is how can we know--and be part of--the universal? In his humane and personal voice, one of the great authors of the 20th Century, ever himself, finds us in the sweet and sad final novel finding, within ourselves, all of us. It surpasses beauty.

I first read these three novels in college, and I've never completely gotton over them, especially the first and last in the set. The basic philosophical question, which is never stated outright, but informs the plot of each novel is "Can we ever really understand another human being." In the final novel, "An Ordinary Life," the author's first person protagonist finds he must ask another question: "Can I ever really understand myself." In answering the second question, he is able (unwittingly) to answer the first. "Hordubal," the first of these novels, is a compelling and haunting rural tragedy, set in 1930's Czechoslovakia. An illiterate Czech farmer who has spent eight years as a miner in America returns to his family in Czechoslovakia, to find his wife and child alienated from him. Within weeks he is murdered. A detective suspects a gypsy boyfriend of the pale wife, but he remains troubled by the idea that he has missed something. The facts are ascertained, but the mystery of Hordubal