Book Review: Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima

by Ivan Klíma
Translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers
Alfred A. Knopf  New York 1991
pp 223

We get old and what is erased? If that is the philosophical question to be explored in this sweeping work (no pun intended), then Ivan Klima answers it. It is difficult to fall in love with “Love and Garbage.” The title alone feels like the author is intent on destroying love the same way one would toss garbage into a incinerator to watch it explode. The narrative covers the protagonist’s childhood through to his adulthood—he is a great literary writer reduced to being a street sweeper by the Czech Communist regime that censors his work. 

So, he takes a job as a garbage man, and this is where the real work begins. He embarks on an affair with an artist to soothe his deflated ego and injured pride, or maybe to spice things up a bit. What could have been a two-week sexual romp evolves into a boring and exasperating affair that is mired in self-loathing, self-absorption, and self-pity. And it goes on and on and on for years. It’s painful to see his wife Lida, an accomplished psychiatrist and the mother of his children, turning herself inside-out to win him back from the other woman. 

There is no understanding as to why the artist Daria passionately wants to be his mistress, and spurn the attention of her handsome, young, attentive husband. And there is no reason why his wife would want him back. He’s just not a great man, even when he’s chasing down a young man in dire need of medication, his good intentions feel hollow. 

The repeated use of jerkish, as a leitmotif, is maddeningly annoying! The constant references to Kafka and Kierkegaard feel contrived and are an assault to one’s sensibility. A literary author does not have to drop the names of intellectuals, authors, and thought leaders to create great literature. American popular culture seeps in every so often with far flung mentions of Scott Joplin, George Gershwin... “The youth was whistling a Gershwin tune.” Imagine whistling “Rhapsody in Blue!” That is a long and complicated whistle!

I am not sure if Ivan Klima wrote a memoir, auto fiction, or fiction. If I had to guess, I’d say this is the story of his life, nicely embellished with some wonderful descriptions of natural and urban environs of Czechoslovakia prior to the Velvet Revolution. Klima writes boldly and beautifully, capturing a time in Czech History that will never come again, and for that reason alone, “Love and Garbage” is worth reading. But the story is too convoluted and meandering to enjoy. We get old and what is erased?, the author asks in the beginning. What is erased is clear. The author is both so impressed and so imprisoned by his old world maleness that he erases himself as a person.