Aviaries starts with a diary entry
from December 20, 2011; two days after the death of Václav Havel. From the very
beginning, we're aware that we're diving into an ordinary world but seen with dubious
perception.1 The central
character Alžběta (Běta) lives in a
basement of an apartment complex. Her mind wandering in and out of reality and
with no job to keep her occupied, she busies herself dealing with memories and daily
formalities of an ordinary Czech life—In this regard, Aviaries is not an
apolitical work but it deals with it in a subtle way. The atmosphere is
predictable and unsatisfying to Běta and she senses a new rule of life has
become dominant while her daughter lives off the dumpsters. Běta keeps her
rituals: visiting offices for possible vacancy and psychiatrist, for she's
thrown into the kaleidoscope world very often evoking distant memories and
times but also branching into the unreal world; her complex figments. Her whims
are sometimes churned into technical details but again boil down to the sense
of being alone.2
1.
Something is happening. Something's in the air.
Something isn't right.
2.
I'd like to hear a human voice, I'd like so much
for someone to sit next to sit down next to me again, but everyone here is
scrolling through their phones, diving masks over their eyes and mute butterfly
nets over their mouths.
Monologues, snippets from
newspaper, conversations and wordplay that appear under diary entries or
separate headings dilute the narrative, bring randomness to the structure but
still add to the reflection of Běta, who is in the middle of seamlessly blended
bleak, literal and phantasmagorical world around her. As she tries to establish connection between
events and changes, some truth3
bobs up on its own and things shuffle like a deck of cards, such that an
instant, object or memory reappears in flashes. The projected world at times
seems to be coming from the psychological complex of Běta and other characters:
Alice, Nadia, Běta's Mother, Melda, merely painted with her ideas; but all
share a dreamy world. The world is as such: everybody has lost the essence and
become objectified, and the only pleasure they derive is from their imagination
and retention, meanwhile Běta evolves to become more vigilant4 but obscure.5
3.
"Nobody ever gets used to a constant
feeling of injustice, not the nation, not a city, not even the private
individual. Never gets used to it, never makes peace with it, but merely brings
the anger down to a simmer, becomes small and sour, silent and sad, starts to
slouch and loses hope. Small and sour, slouching and sad, silent and hopeless
was the city of Prague…"
4.
Time drove me on, spurred me on with kurbash and
scourge, whistling and whooping cheerfully until after fifty-four years it
drove me with its spurs into a rather ordinary, spacious pen sown with
desiccated grasses of the present. But what kind of pen was it, here amid
complete desolation with no sign of a fence anywhere that would enclose this
monstrously symmetrical space, festering like the bottom of an old well?
5.
In another time and place this was image of you,
Alice. You're already dissolving, receding, changing, thinning, waning into the
distance, and yet it's as if someone has burned the image into the back of my brain.
Where am I going?
Běta's visions are humane but her
grasp of reality is still misty and we cannot map the other world9, if such thing exists,
since everything flows into one6,
not rambling but sharp awareness. While reading, sometimes we feel like being
transported from one percept and time to another, seeking connection but the
dreams roll in, infringing or rather expanding into grandeur construct of the
mind7. Meanwhile, as she
has to face the almost disrupted8
and pitiful world every day, amid the surge of barren news, Běta feels lack of
her daughter Alice's presence, which brings back past moments they shared and
she tries to contain within herself those dearest to her heart.
6.
"Don't forget the recollection is always a
reconstruction, never a reproduction."
7.
"You're a sieve, Běta, just a sieve merely sifting through other
people's identities"
8.
Prague reflects off the river. And so it is here
twofold —
while I can barely endure the one… Awareness, and yet a remarkable emptiness,
for all these props — and even my speech is a prop — are just an accretion of
completely empty squares.
9.
I pulled out a broken light bulb from my purse,
held it right in front of my eyes, and gazed at the snapped filament for a long
time. It contained the entire world — reptiles, brains, black pucks, ropes,
dumpsters, Madrid streets full of people, blood-soaked rags, El Greco, and
Goya.
The novella is surreal and
hallucinatory often with same markers and ideas repeated, mostly toward the
end, as if the world is in a trap or moving in circles, or in a vortex of
dreams and reality. The story unfolds into mothers and daughters, lifting the
idea of mother being inside a daughter. Clocks, snakes, a human-tree, stolen
paintings, Bob Dylan, Infant Jesus, eternal waiting rooms —
the work demands to be read with patience, and multiple readings is even
better. Aviaries is a blend of motherhood, loneliness, psychological insights
and horror, political dislocations and the human urge to be tied together.
Author: Zuzana
Brabcová
Translator: Tereza
Novická
Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
Page Count:
132pp
Price: $16
Photo
Credit: https://www.druhemesto.cz/autor/brabcova-zuzana
Copy
Courtesy: Twisted Spoon Press
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