Narrative
Ever Green Is...
Večne je zelený...
Pavel Vilikovský · 1989
Synopsis
An old man, a former spy, undertakes before a single listener the story of his life, and first of how an Austro-Hungarian intelligence chief seduced him. But he constantly strays into exaggerations, anecdotes and philosophical digressions, touching up his own confession as he goes, from the Central Europe of the Empire to that of communism. From this self-satisfied monologue emerge a comic mosaic and the portrait of an unflattering character.
Context
Published in 1989, the year the regime fell, this short narrative is regarded as one of the major works of Slovak postmodern prose. Its hall-of-mirrors construction, in which the narrator keeps correcting his own version, has recalled Koestler for its politics and Beckett for its darkness, and its tone the whimsy of Hrabal and Čapek's irony towards ideologues. It appeared in English in the early two thousands, translated by Charles Sabatos, together with two other texts by the author; it does not exist in French.
Who it is for
For a devious and funny monologue on a century of Central European history, to be read as a game of mirrors on truth and lies.
Prizes and reception
Regarded in Slovakia as a summit of postmodernism, it was praised in English for its irony and its devious construction.