Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light: A Novel (ISBN 0312140924)

The Unbearable Emptiness of Being:
Ivan Klima's Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light is set in Czechoslovakia in 1989. The old Communist regime, in place since 1948, hangs by a thread as the Velvet Revolution, led by students and dissident writers, such as Vaclav Havel (who went on to become President of the Czech Republic) and Ludvik Vaculik among others grows stronger daily. The novel's protagonist is Pavel Fukova. The story on its surface centers on Pavel's relationship with his old friend Peter, and Alice the girl they both loved. The inner story involves Pavel's apprehension about his own life and future as the long hoped for struggle for freedom races towards the finish line. Pavel is a news cameraman for the government-run Czech television station, an institution loathed by most Czechs as an instrument of oppression, boring news reports, and propoganda. Pavel took on this job after he and his friend Peter were released from prison after they attempted to flee the country in 1968 after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague spring. (In real life Klima was in the U.S. in August 1968 but choose to return and found his work banned by the Soviet-controlled regime. In fact, Klima repeatedly refused `offers' from the old regime to emigrate. When asked why, he explained that "to be a writer means also to stick up for people whose fate is not a matter of indifference to me"). Pavel realizes that taking on this job may be seen as an implicit acceptance of an oppressive regime but he takes it on while explaining to himself that it will allow him to write screenplays that can be produced once the regime ends. Scenes from his screenplays, almost all autobiographical to a degree are woven into the novel. Peter, upon his release from prison, decided to withdraw from society altogether and winds up as the caretaker of a remote old castle far removed from the political storms that best life in Prague. The core of the novel focuses on the impact those choices have had on Pavel's outward and inward life. It is hard to explain the impact the novel had on this reader. I was reminded of two things I had learned in my life. As a child taking religious instruction I was taught that a "sacrament was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." In Waiting for the Dark I saw how Pavel's outward and visible compromise with an oppressive regime inexorably led to the diminution if not total elimination of whatever inward and spiritual (not necessarily to be taken in a religious context) grace he possessed in his heady younger days when he loved Alice and made a mad, hopelessly futile dash for freedom with Peter. Peter is scarred inwardly as well, due in part to his insistence on removing himself as far as he could from any outward and visible influences. Peter acknowledges this late in the novel when he turns to Pavel and says, "we are both scarred in our own way." I was also reminded of the words of the Russian/Soviet writer, Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Oisp Mandelstam. She once said that "a person with inner freedom, memory, and fear is that reed, that twig that changes the direction of a rushing river." What Klima has done here I think is to deal with people, in the form of Pavel, who have made outward compromises with a repressive regime in order supposedly to maintain their inner freedom only to find that those compromises lead to the opposite result. Pavel knows on some conscious level that he is neither a reed or twig that has contributed to the rushing river of freedom. The realization leads to despair, ennui, and ultimately a life not worth living. It is Pavel's awareness of the inner emptiness that gives the novel meaning and poignancy. The book is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I am a careful reader and despite that fact it sometimes left me confused as Klima jumps from the story to Pavel's screenplay in a manner that often left me scratching my head. I was compelled to re-read a few passages (try) to make sure I understood where Klima was going. Ultimately, this is a book well worth reading. It caused me to engage in no small amount of self-reflection and for me that alone was worth the `price of admission.

Powerful and insightful:
This novel explores the events before and after the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia through the experiences of a photographer. Under Communist rule, he was forced to take artless phtotgraphs for news agencies but had always dreamed of being able to pursue his art and make great films. After the revolution, he may have his chance. The novel works both as the story of a single man's life and in exploring more generally how Czech society after Communism did and did not live of to the dreams of freedom that its citizens had. There is a safety in unattainable dreams that is no longer there once they are realizable. (Think _The Iceman Cometh_.)

Like Jackie Mason says: "Gorgeous!...Simply gorgeous!" Read this and prepare to be entertained!:
You know a book's *that* good when it manages to survive the rigourous process of translation--in Mr. Klima's case, from Czech--into English, yet still retain elements of what made it so goshdarned ab-fab in the vernacular. Ivan Klima--drum roll, please, and preferrably at the Rudolfinum venue in Prague--is rapidly becoming my all-time kick-posterior novelist in this "golden" city. His WAITING FOR THE DARK, WAITING FOR THE LIGHT (WFTD,WFTL) is a fine example of just why he's one of the Czech so-called "Republic's" (<-- what the heck does THAT mean?) pre-eminent scribes. Of course, when people ask me which country Klima hails from, I always respond that he comes from the former Austrian territory once known as "Boehmen" (Bohemia). Any other moniker, incidentally, is totally meaningless and I don't even recognize its alleged sovereignty. But I digress... This novel isn't what I'd consider an easy read, by any stretch, mesdames et messieurs (or as we say in the vernacular, "dame a panove"). Even for those of you super swift readers who think you're "all that," one occasionally needs to glance over these various pages a second (and often, third) time because the Klima-ster's thoughts are chewy like a chocolate-y granola bar--but triply as fortifying. Mr. Ivan Klima isn't at all interested in delivering pithy lines of pulpy drek to a mass audience of daft dolts, even though it's painfully clear to this here 'zon Reviewer (note the capitalized "R," toots!) that the masses would best be served by the prosaic dishings-out of a one, Mr. Klima. Klima goes for the top shelf booze bottles, babies. He aims to stay there. I've long contemplated over hot cups of espresso served up in cafes nestled in comfortable but dark Prague Inner District alleyways (atop those saintly cobbles) at how Mr. Klima goes about his writerly day. How DOES he manage to build up his scenes or construct his looping and oftentimes intertwining narratives?! Where does the Bohemian phenomenon get his inspiration for some of his more introspective passages? Surely, his experience as a child survivor of the one and only true Holocaust plays a part. The horrors he witnessed during his hellish soujourn in the Nazi Terezin/Teresienstadt are certainly more than enough trauma to last a human a lifetime, but I've long felt that there's something more at play here, ladies and germs. Mr. Klima's brain works a little differently than the mere mortal, and this perhaps explains away in large part why his many stories are so blimmin' convincing. Pain, in Mr. Klima's case, is the hummus which keeps his lines together. You realize that I'm not gracing WFTD,WFTL with any particular favouritism (and please add the "u" in this word, you Across the Pond ignoramouses!). I admit that I generally go for all of Mr. Klima's works without any set plan. All of his stuff totally rocks the socks off of what passes for literature in the marketplace, and I challenge any Average Joe (or posterior wipes like B. Andrews) to select any TWO of Klima's works and then come back with some negative feedback. If you do, you need to go back to school. Or Vancouver. Klima's stuff is just that good. Pay special attention, kids, to the gleanings from the immediate pre-1989 period, and note the publication years for some of these books. They're all formerly banned tomes under the "Communist" regime, and you should thank you lucky stars, dance a couple of daily jigs, and be grateful as all get-up that we have a talent such as Ivan Klima. Eat porridge, in celebration of this fact. Like a finely aged wine, Mr. Klima had to weather the storm of an idiotic administration during the so-called "former" Czechoslovakian Third Republic's experimentation with "Communism" in order to deliver liquid writerly gold under high pressure. Be thankful that we have him. Be thankful that he's teaching us. I remain, faithfully, his greatest expat fan in Prague, ADM

When Freedom Comes, Can It be Grasped?:
Transitions are difficult, equally so for individuals and societies. Pavel F. is a man who was born at just the right time or just the wrong time for a major transition; his fate is in the balance and there is no clear external weight or prop (neither faith nor hope nor charity) that he can use to swing that balance in the desired direction. His age is almost identical to that of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic which enmeshes him like a spider's web. He is a professional film-maker, producing documentaries and news snippets in a system of censorship that is losing its own guidelines and signposts, sending him equivocal signals about what is permissible, since everyone is positioning him- or herself for the coming changes while they still fear the residual power of the old rulers. Clearly he has technical skill, and possibly he has enough talent to realize artistic ambitions which he has "kept on the shelf" in order to be poised to do something ambitious and meaningful once society changes. The peculiar transition in which he is adrift is the last months of the old Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and the first months of the "new system" which will replace it, a system this is gilded by hopeful rhetoric but whose nature may be as hostile to him as an individual as its predecessor was. This novel is a portrait of a very ambiguous time and place. Collectively and politically, it is the moment of the "return of the repressed" (people and ideas that have been deliberately kept at the margins of society, including periods of imprisonment), some of whom will counsel forgiveness and others who will seek revenge -- or, more demoralizing, mediocre and self-centered people who will merely practice the age-old opportunism of replacing the former bosses. Pavel thinks he knows the dimensions of his own compromises in the past; he cannot condemn himself for these (as his old friend Peter does), since they were undertaken in order to save his talent (but does it exist?) for some future significant artistic venture. His personal life has been equally compromised, consisting of a series of failed relationships with women in which he appears to be the more defective partner in each case, through his inconstancy, his lack of ideals, his inability to commit himself to an individual, a gesture which he always perceives as a trap (reflecting the way he was trapped when, as a young man, he attempted to flee his nation and was captured by border-guards.) He is also witnessing the slow death of his mother (a decay from within, since her mind is vanishing while her body lingers on). He is unsure of the correct way to deal with this situation -- how to avoid the guilt of an inadequate response -- as he is of everything else in his life. This is a brief synopsis of Pavel's story. But "Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light " has another story which unwinds itself as Pavel moves through this critical year (1989-1990) in a state of increasing mental and emotional dismay, a parallel "what if" story which comprises three threads. The threads, which constitute each chapter's ending under the rubric "Film", are separate at first then begin to intertwine, weaving together three people and their stories: Pavel's "double", the photographer Fuka, who has undertaken a difficult and self-defeating romantic relationship with an idealized and uncompromising woman named Albina, a transformation of Peter's wife Alice; Robert, who awaits execution after a failed escape across the border, during which he held a school bus full of children hostage - it ends badly with the death of his partner and the bus driver at the hands of the State security services; and the long-ruling President (although not named, this is clearly Gustav Husak), whose mind is representative of the sclerotic society which he "leads", wavering between paranoia about his colleagues and endless self-justifications for the harsh measures he has used against this own countrymen, constantly caught up in the irrelevant rituals of a dying State. He is also plagued by ghosts and has hallucinatory conversations with his deceased wife. At times he feels trapped by the system he has helped to create and enforce, and he dreams of escaping it as much as Pavel once did and Robert now does. These three hypothetical lives, which displace Pavel's story and relationships with spectral images of the real world in which he dwells unhappily, move toward a dramatic (though entirely imaginary) conclusion, an episode which is brutal, somewhat insane, and blackly farcical at the same time. And this may be the beginning of a chance for Pavel's salvation in the terms which he has chosen for himself - a story that might become the realized screenplay of a film in which he says what he wants to say about himself and others. There are many brief philosophical inquiries, in the form of questions as they are phrased in a catechism, which punctuate the narrative, questions which Pavel attempts to answer as truthfully as he can, although the answers are often unsatisfactory. The book ends with one such question, concerning the nature and constancy of the "self", and it is stated in a way that is reminiscent not of Kafka (who is often cited as a great influence on Klima) but of the last part of K. Capek's "An Ordinary Life". The character of Pavel has his predecessors in the annals of the Czech and Slovak "literature of dissent" that blossomed during the brief and misleading "thaw" of official repression that took place after Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech of 1956. This climatic change moved slowly westward into Czechoslovakia and led to a half-decade of frustrated hopes that socialism would be reformed and humanized from within. Two of the prominent works of this dissident literature were L. Mnacko's "A Taste of Power" and L. Vaculik's "The Axe". Pavel recombines many of the social and psychological characteristics of the protagonists of these two novels (who are, respectively, Mnacko's Frank, an official news photographer who also harbors a secret redemptive project, and the anonymous journalist of `The Axe", who begins to test the limits of what he is allowed to observe and write concerning the failures of the political system and the culture it has created.) The difference between Klima's Pavel and these earlier incarnations comes about, one might say, as an accident of one's birth-date, since the earlier characters have a "pre-regime" life and memories which qualify their understanding of the present and fuel their hopes for the future. Pavel has no such experience extraneous to the system and finds it difficult to establish any basis for hope. The style of the work, as conveyed in an excellent translation by Paul Wilson, is plain and declarative, even as it creates the skewed alternate world of the "Film" segments. Klima was once asked by Philip Roth (in an interview published in "The Spirit of Prague") if he was anxious about the loss of the oppressive conditions in which so many independent-spirited Czech and Slovak authors produced their best work (i.e., the loss of a society in which so much was forbidden that the writer gained an exalted status as an articulate truth-teller to those in power and their victims). He was not worried about this "loss" of context, suspecting that whatever replaced the old system would form men and women in a way which would require examination and exposition for its full understanding, that there would always be significant opportunities for art and artists. In this novel he takes the first step into this new milieu, which is something of a swamp, unclear in its outlines and shrouded in the mist of the present, which is often more obscuring than that of the past.

Autumn of a would-be patriarch:
The allusion to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "The Autumn of the Patriarch" is intentional; the most intriguing character for me was not the protagonist--with his endless ruminating and grumbling--but the figure of the President governing rather tenuously a place very like Czechoslovakia under communist tyranny. Klima could have written a novel about a figure like him rather than a dissident disillusioned for a change. Like his other novels, here Klima carefully constructs a story in which the plot alone will not carry you along. The film that the narrator imagines out of his everyday reality makes for an intriguing contrast between art and real life, but this sort of story within a story by an artist by now has lost its originality. Where Klima best succeeds is in examining how people compromise themselves to survive an otherwise intolerable situation, and his works deserve attention for their honesty. Not a lot happens--the soporific tone may mirror the grey nature of the state of which Klima writes; little of it comes alive save a few glimpses of nature. I suppose that's the point, but it makes for slow going. I like the epigrams tossed about the text, but this feature of Klima's style jars you a bit, since his tales constantly shift between meditations on powerlessness and resistance to totalitarianism and a conventional story in which not much happens to a dithering narrator, recognizably human to be sure but never particularly loveable. I'd start with his shorter stories before tackling this rambling novel.