A new series from Penguin: 10 central European classics from writers such as Karel Capek, Josef kvoreský, EM Cioran and Thomas Bernhard, all with rather pleasingly colourful covers, whose design, it would appear, is intended to convey the particular flavour of literature composed behind or in the looming shade of what used to be called the iron curtain. This is a wonderful idea.
I picked on Mrozek because, to be honest, I'd never read him and felt I should. I'm very glad I did: for the 42 stories here, some of them less than a page long, offer varied experiences which you won't find anywhere else. They are absurdist parables, by turns hilarious, unsettling and enigmatic.
They were first published in 1957, and the wonder is that it took until 1968 for Mrozek's writing to be banned in Poland (the author condemned Poland's role in the invasion of Czechoslovakia; his fame as a playwright presumably protected him hitherto). The authorities must have been either dense, preoccupied, or tolerant, for the satiric intent is unambiguous, and offers hope to the oppressed mind.
Take the title story. (If you don't want it spoiled, skip this paragraph and the next.) A provincial town's understocked zoo is allocated an elephant "three thousand rabbits were a poor substitute for the noble giant". However, the director, a keen patriot, eager to make "a modest contribution to the common task and struggle", writes to the authorities and suggests they save money by sending the zoo an inflatable rubber elephant instead. "It is well known that the elephant is a sluggish animal and it does not run and jump about. In the notice on the railings we can state that this particular elephant is exceptionally sluggish."
After some difficulty ("What am I going to tell the Missus?" asks a zookeeper obliged to put the plan into execution. "She'll never believe me if I say that I spent the night blowing up an elephant") the beast is displayed behind a sign saying: "Particularly sluggish. Hardly moves." However, when a party of schoolchildren is being shown the gas-filled beast, it slips its moorings and floats away, just as their teacher is saying "the weight of a fully grown elephant is between nine and thirteen thousand pounds". The story closes with the information that the children who witnessed the scene "soon started neglecting their studies and turned into hooligans . . . And they no longer believe in elephants."
This is so deft and so piercing that you wonder how Mrozek got away with it. (In another story, a boy who wants to find out what a giraffe is like is advised to look it up in Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. Mrozek makes good use of the curiosity and scepticism of children.) Perhaps it is because not all the stories are satires on totalitarianism. "The Co-operative" is a rather touching (and funny) story about an enterprise devoted to providing drinking companions for the lonely. "Thanks to us, those who want to drink and have the liquor get together with those who have none but feel the same need."
But although state communism is the chief target, do not make the mistake of considering the book of only historical interest. This is not a mindset which has disappeared. "A Citizen's Fate", in which the manager of a meteorological station gets into trouble with the authorities because his accurate weather reports are "a bit on the depressing side", reminds me strongly of those university departments you hear of where not even the most illiterate and ignorant student is allowed to fail.
The interesting thing about Mrozek is that, by his own account, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the communist cause until at least 1954, when he worked on a state-funded newspaper. The job certainly gave him an ear for the wooden language of bureaucracy.
In short, a miniaturised, crazed Kafka; there's even a story here called "The Trial", although it couldn't be more different in tone from Kafka. In it, authors are put into uniform and ranked so each knows who is better than the other. Literary critics, however, are sent to the salt mines. I'm not sure I like that.
