Seeing People Off

July 10, 2017
In Slovak author Beňová’s supple English-language debut, Elza and Ian are bohemians living off wine and garlic in Petržalka, “a place where time plays no role” on the outskirts of Bratislava. Ian is a writer—of what is unclear—and Elza’s odd jobs include public relations management for a Holocaust-themed reality show and writing for several competing newspapers, a feat she manages by using a different pseudonym for each. Elza carries out lively debates with her friend Rebeka, a tennis line judge who is in and out of mental institutions. In one vignette, Elza becomes smitten with a dancer named Kalisto Tanzi, whom she meets for trysts in parked cars; in another she is followed home by a strange child who bites her neck. Other characters come and go, including the film student Sang-Fun, who claims that the idea for The Da Vinci Code was stolen from his unpublished manuscript, and the unpredictable Elfman, whose alcoholism is hampered by the fact that he neither likes the taste of alcohol nor can drink without throwing up. If nothing quite seems to happen, it’s because Beňová is more interested in the rhythm of the city “of lovemaking, work, parties, earning and spending, gaining and losing.” She is in the first generation of post-Soviet writers for whom scarcity and censorship is a recent memory, and the political is always lurking just behind the breezy Aimee Bender–like prose.