BOOK REVIEW

Jana Beňová’s Seeing People Off

By Catherine Campbell     FEBRUARY 2, 2018

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When a city is haunted and largely defined by its past, how does it affect its youngest generations? The answer to this question is teased through a maze of surreal detail and sophisticated prose in Seeing People Off, the English debut of Slovakian author Jana Beňová and winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.

Translated by Janet Livingstone, the novel is a snapshot of post-socialist life and ennui in Slovakia’s capital city of Bratislava, telescoping into the borough of Petržalka (“the belly of Stalin”) and the intertwined lives of four artists who call themselves The Quartet. Elza, the main character and primary narrator, lives with her longtime partner, Ian. Elza’s close friend Rebeka (“my Carl Solomon”) and her husband, Lukas, round out their circle.

There isn’t a lot that happens in the book, which makes one wonder if that’s not the author’s intent. Readers are forced to move through the city’s downtrodden streets at a wandering pace with the characters, back and forth in time, inside and outside of Elza’s head. Elza and her group of friends frequently gather at their favorite cafe, The Hyena; this hangout is aptly named as it reflects the artists’ view that they are scavengers in their own city, their need for economic survival as a pack. Each friend takes a turn working a random job in order to support the other three with a regular stipend, thus allowing them to pursue their art. Meanwhile, Elza has an affair with an actor named Kalisto Tanzi, which becomes her tenuous, vicarious attachment to what success must feel like. Other small events—a childhood remembered, a mental breakdown, run-ins with apartment neighbors—swell and fall like ocean waves, but they don’t necessarily serve as subplots and often go unresolved.

Although most of the characters identify as artists, there is a dark humor throughout the book that plays with the idea of the public-versus-private payoff for artistic creation, and Beňová seems to poke fun at a career that requires much emotional and mental labor with very little return. Elza’s friend, amateur filmmaker and aspiring author Sang-Fun, works as the “spokeswoman for Shakespeare, a company that made fishing supplies.” As Sang-Fun speaks to Elza about her recently finished novel, she remarks: “I didn’t want to publish it here. Publishing work in Slovakia doesn’t make sense. I approached an English publisher. They wrote to me saying I should send a 30-page excerpt in English. So I sent it and waited. And what do you think happened next? In six months The Da Vinci Code came out. Based on my excerpt.”

These humorous asides are welcome in a narrative that appears to have no climactic anchor. As the characters try to figure out what they’re doing from one day to the next, a dark, gloomy atmosphere hangs over the city and is revealed by Beňová to be the weight of Bratislava’s past, which is creating a bleak, possibly pointless future. There are constant reminders of the city’s past involvement with Nazi Germany, as it once served as the site of a labor camp. People seem to move through their days out of habit or necessity, not by desire. The other citizens, referred to as “pancakes,” all look alike, and their chatter is nonstop wherever Elza or her friends rest and reside: the voices of Petržalka clash together in large housing complexes, cafes, streets. And the sense of existential terror is heightened by surreal details: the walls talk and play music constantly, the hospital walls glow from flames of pain, and painted swastikas decorate the sidewalk in front of what should be a sanctuary or respite: a park bench.

The younger generations, like Elza’s, have seemingly inherited a genetic sadness and fear from all the past events that have taken place in Bratislava: “Elfman claims that the genius loci of Petržalka is in fact that, in time, everyone here starts to feel like an asshole who never amounted to anything in life.”

Beňová (and subsequently Livingstone) choose language carefully for each scene. At 142 pages, this slim book contains sentences that require a second reading as well as time to pause and let the weight of the prose settle. There is quite a bit of existential reflection in both first and third person, largely by Elza, as she grapples with the idea that she isn’t living as a unique and independent individual, as she is simply a part of Petržalka’s puzzle, the city of “window after window, a common backstage. Common spaces, a common, never-silent choir.” She declares she’ll never get away from the borough and must protect her beloved, who is trapped living there as well.

One of novel’s greatest strengths is Beňová’s ability to seamlessly weave these surreal and horrific details together with heartbreakingly humanistic scenes that continue to suspend the reader’s disbelief. When one of the characters suffers a mental breakdown and is hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, they reminisce about a day when they ran into their favorite actress in a cafe and, after feverishly looking for paper for her to autograph, had the actress sign their box of antidepressants instead. And as Ian cares for his mother as she slowly loses her memory, Elza notices his mother starting to redefine her son the only way she can: her son is a good caretaker (a “miserable idiot,” Mama whispers).

Beňová’s English debut can and should be considered a powerful, generational novel, one which brings awareness to the foggy future and aimless existence of a specific age group in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Its ambling plot is certainly not for everyone, but the book’s pointillistic portrait of life in a city from which it feels nearly impossible to escape may ring true for some readers. Other audiences will be drawn to the universal theme of questioning, wrestling with, and embracing artistic ambitions even when the odds are against you.

At one point, Ian consoles Elza: “Life isn’t only about putting on a smile.” This moment, an isolated sentence in its chapter, serves as a reminder each reader can hold in the palm of his or her hand for the rest of the novel.




CATHERINE CAMPBELL is a fiction writer, essayist, and book critic. Her writing appears in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Writer’s Digest, The Millions, The Rumpus, Brain, Child Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Seeing People Off. By Jana Beňová. Translated by Janet Livingstone. Two Dollar Radio, 2017.

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