The finest novel written in Slovakia ever, Peter Pišťanek's The Rivers of Babylon was first published to great acclaim in 1991. Inside its covers, the character Rácz was revealed as the archetypal post-Communist "East European gangster". This revelation came as quite a shock to those controlling the local foreign exchange trading in Bratislava and the goons operating further east.
Rácz was drawn so closely from the competing Bratislava post-Communist "elites" that it became difficult differentiate "the real Rácz". Was he an ex-secret policeman, an ex-member of the Czechoslovak Politburo, an up-and-coming "Slovak Nationalist" politician or a real live rural ponce trying to make it as a post Soviet Prince Michael? He was all and none and more.
Despite making only a cameo appearance in the second volume of what later became a trilogy,"The Wooden Village" was first oublished in 1994. Pišťanek's readers delighted in further tales of the "wild east". Already familiar characters described their participation in Rácz's byznyz: hotels, drugs and prostitution; and their ancillaries: the white slave trade, fetish clubs, porn movies, money laundering and other adventures and opportunities derived from the "privatisation" or "theft" of former state owned assets in the former self-governing province of Czechoslovakia.
By 1999 and now free from subsidising Slovak notions of self-determination and democracy, the Czechs of the former Czechoslovakia re-established themselves as a constitutional monarchy in the final installment: "The End of Freddy". In a flourish of Biblical proportions, The Royal Czech Navy assists Slovak separatists in a northern Arctic archipelago in return for a promise of the crude oil seeping up from the coastal tundra - killing Russian-speaking mercenaries along the way. Led by the reformed pornographer, Freddy, the absurd became real and the real absurd.
Published in English in the late noughties by the marvellous Garnett Press, The Rivers of Babylon received rapturous reviews in the TLS, Independent, Guardian and Telegraph written by Britain's leading literary critics and authors. Those reviews made comparisons with the comic writing by Rabelais, Balzac and Gogol (Tim Beasley-Murray in the TLS); "less Dostoyevsky and more Tom Sharpe" (Tibor Fischer in the Telegraph).
However, Pišťanek and Rácz were not praised enough. The Rivers of Babylon trilogy is a striking piece of alternative social history pretending to be satire. Absurdists from a different era: Havel and Ionescu are shown to be polite and dated petit bourgeois parlour pseuds. Pišťanek is raw and compelling and still fresh where the absurd is real and the real absurd.
Something that could be described as Ruritanian Gothic...
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