Lovers for a Day

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 30 AGO 1999

Sophisticated readers may expect to admire anything new from the justly revered Czech novelist (Waiting for the Light, Waiting for the Dark). Many of them will be disappointed with these 12 short stories. Klima's tales are sorted into three unequal sections: "Lovers for One Night" collects five stories from the 1960s, while "Intimate Conversations" and "About Love and Death" hold seven from the '80s and '90s. All these dejected fictions concern the success or failure of hopeful myths of intimacy--but they are not equally successful. The fiction from the '60s tends to drown in involuted rhetoric; sometimes it's trite, other times it's supercharged with languid enervations and prominent symbolism through which the characters barely appear. It's hard to know whether the translator or Klima is responsible for such clunky prose as "She knew everything. She knew precisely why it was worth living. She knew precisely why it was not worth living." The last few tales (all from 1994) strike clearer, would-be Chekhovian notes. In "Rich Men Tend to Be Strange," a greedy car dealer, dying in a terminal ward, tries to leave a fortune in cash to his nurse. "The White House" is brilliant by any reckoning: a student falls in love--or is it love?--with a disarmingly honest blind girl, who insists that he's planning to leave her. But other recent stories can be dismayingly predictable and banally sententious. An underappreciated wife, mother and nurse in "A Baffling Choice" becomes enamored of her downstairs neighbor, a 65-year-old invalid, bookbinder and self-taught painter. When he seems about to reject her, she asks, "How could he call into question the very thing that had raised them above what would otherwise be a meaningless existence?" Klima likes to stop and spell out the point he's making, in a manner alien to most modern English-language fiction. Only sometimes do the philosophical rewards of his methods seem worth its costs in detail.