BOOK REVIEW : Catapulted Right Into Another Czech Reality

Catapult by Vladimir Paral; translated by William Harkins (Cat Bird Press, $15.95; 226 pp).

“Catapult,” first published in Czechoslovakia in the Prague spring of 1968, sports, just in typographical terms, one of the worst and one of the best things that can happen to literature of this kind.

The worst is one of those fiercely terrible introductions designed to make the novel seem “important” and “meaningful.” It talks about “imagery that turns away from the humanized metaphor that animates the world about us to a dehumanized system of images that surround the novel’s heroes with a whole world of bleak, disspiritualized material objects.” (What is it about human nature that won’t let a reader pick up a good novel and enjoy it, but feels the overpowering need to dose us first with sentences like that?) This introduction also compares “Catapult” with the Don Juan and Faust myths, and tells us that this sweet little narrative is a “parodic expose of Eastern European Socialism, of wasted economic potential. . . .” In short, the introduction does everything it can, in four dreary pages, to make you put the book down.

On the other hand, the publishers had a fortunate brainstorm when they listed the characters, with all their nicknames, a tiny description and phonetic transliteration of how to pronounce everyone’s various monikers so you don’t have to worry about keeping “Janicka,” “Lenicka” and “Lenunka” straight. It is also suggested that this page be cut out and used as a book mark, and this device works perfectly. It’s easy to keep characters sorted out and enjoy the story.

Now that Czechoslovakia is on the road to reform, it seems that everybody and his brother was over there during the Prague spring. They’ve come out of American woodwork now with their Czech stories.

Why should I be the exception? I was in Slovakia six weeks after the Russian invasion, saw the tanks, wore a Dubchek flag in my lapel and so on. I was also an adult in 1968 (was that the year after the Summer of Love or the year of it? ), and based on this dual expertise, my reading of “Catapult” may be somewhat revisionist.

Put another way, the trials that the Brno-based Cottex Corp., which seemed to manufacture nothing at all, were not all that different from the trials of the RAND Corp., in Santa Monica. All over the world that year, men were looking at their homes, their wives, their children, their errands, their parcels, their burdens, with a terrible disgust. All over the world (even in China, in a whole other way), men were saying, I hate my daily life, this laundry, this baby-talking kid of mine, this lump-wife I’m stuck with, there’s got to be more! All over the world, regardless of race, creed, color, political affiliation, grown men were looking wistfully out windows and dreaming of the sea.

And so does Jacek Jost, married to Lenka, father to little Lenicka. Jacek is bored out of his wits, and when his train stops, catapulting him into the lap of a beautiful Nada, he is more than ready for an affair. In fact, he’s ready for six more affairs, with six other ladies, and the six alternate lives that they bring along with him. In vain does Jacek try to get his wife to “discover” his flagrant infidelities. Her good heart and willful dullness foil him at every turn. Jacek brings home hairpins--which his wife claims as her own. He tries to drive her seriously crazy by turning on the kitchen appliances when she’s out of the room. It doesn’t work. And his clumsy attempts at wife-swapping only make her cry.

But another law of human nature is at work here: That which Jacek despises, other men envy onto madness. Lenka is not the dull little slice of meat loaf that her husband perceives her to be, and even as Jacek tries and tries to be rid of his wife once and for all (going through the apartment, mentally labeling things he will either take or leave, and if that’s a Socialist trait, I guess we’re all Socialists), other forces contrive to push him out of his safe domestic nest.

“Catapult” would make a wonderful movie, a screwball comedy, descendant of the lovely, crazy Czech “Closely Watched Trains,” or very distant cousins of the “Lavender Hill Mob.” Just once, if you pick up this book, forget the weighty issues of the larger world. And remember that every hard-working husband over 30 has at least once had a fantasy of turning his worthy wife in for a newer, sportier model.