The Hot Summer of 1968
by Viliam Klimáček
Translated from Slovak by Peter Petro
Mandel Vilar Press, 2021

There’s a refreshing frankness that Slovak playwright Viliam Klimáček brings to his own novel. Renowned in his home country, he was originally encouraged by two Slovak Canadian expats to write a play recognizing the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Performed in both Toronto and Slovakia, that play was ultimately converted into his 2011 novel The Hot Summer of 1968, which a decade later has been published in English for the first time. Instead of the coyness that media consumers have come to expect about stories inspired by real people or events, Klimáček offers his readers this: “Any similarity to persons living or no longer living is no accident, even though much occurred differently than depicted here.” (Would that this phrasing could be copy-pasted throughout the majority of fiction acknowledgements.)

The resulting work harbors strong traces of its mixed origins; written in a scene-by-scene structure and following the fates of three families, The Hot Summer of 1968 feels like an odd combination of novel, play, memoir, and history lesson. Its opening scenes introduce the dramatis personae and document the atmosphere of the Prague Spring, then-Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubek’s attempt to loosen restrictions on media and public life previously normalized under Communism. “Everything was getting better, and people were filled with hope,” the narrator notes. “Once-closed windows were opening, the abundance of fresh air intoxicated people.”

There’s a strong sense in this initial section that the narrator, a self-professed “Slovak of the older generation,” wants to lay down basic cultural groundwork so that an outside audience, whether geographical or merely generational, can understand the novel’s context. This is sometimes charmingly executed, like when he claims that “[a] citizen of Czechoslovakia could overcome his claustrophobic frustrations in one of three ways: by having sex, stealing, or passing someone in his car.” Just as often, this priority appears in the form of intrusive exposition or redundant explanation.

One of the most effective metaphors of these early pages comes when the narrator describes a Bratislava clinic performing “the first heart transplant in the socialist bloc.” Rich political parallels arise in the ensuing pages: the infusion of new heart and blood into a sick patient; the excitement of seeing an organ begin to function; the possibility of the unfamiliar heart being viewed by the body as an “invasion.” After all this careful work, the narrator concludes by observing, “Our first patient lived five hours after her operation. In 1968, all of Czechoslovakia tried to exchange its old heart for a new one. It lived for three hundred days.”

Heavy-handed or not, Klimáček transitions effectively to the surprise invasion of their peaceful country. Czechoslovak citizens struggle to believed that such a thing could happen, even as tanks roll into their streets. Surely the rest of the world will not allow this? But the rest of the world stands by as the Soviet and Warsaw Pact militaries enforce their previously untested power over their neighbor and ally. In the immediate aftermath, several categories of Czech and Slovak citizens flee their homeland. For some, this is the final push needed to do so, and they depart with “light hearts.” For others, including several of the novel’s main characters, the repressions they’d face in a post-crackdown Czechoslovakia all but force them to abandon their current lives. If they later choose to return, those who escape the country in the summer of 1968 know they will face prison sentences for “illegally leaving the Republic.”

Given the inherent drama of these events, it’s a welcome surprise that the majority of the novel focuses on the long-term consequences of its characters’ choices, and transforms into an unusually in-depth and insightful look at the emigrant experience. Klimáček highlights the untenable dynamics on both ends: the guilt of those who leave their country, and the grief of the family members they leave behind. In Austria, Israel, America, Canada, and wherever else these characters land, they face the uncertainty of learning a new language and finding work. “Canadian experience was the magic formula that stood between immigrants and a job,” the narrator reports. “You could only gain Canadian experience by working in Canada, but in order to work in Canada you needed Canadian experience.” A young woman who had studied to become a doctor learns that her Slovak medical qualifications mean nothing in this new country, and that she must begin the process of certification all over again.

1970 is dubbed “the year of the first divorces” after “[e]migration tested relationships,” although other couples grow closer through hardship. There are varied reactions to becoming “involuntarily replanted flowers,” and a woman who assists new refugees “realize[s] that one group of emigrants would fall in love with the new country and the other would find fault with it forever.” Equally varied are the local responses to this wave of immigrants. Condescension is common; in a memorable scene, an older Austrian couple expects “the girl from the Eastern bloc” to be impressed by their toilet. More well-meaning people have a tendency to treat individual Slovaks as “unofficial ambassadors” of their home country. Throughout, there’s an astute balancing of shared versus individual experiences—a dual recognition of the usefulness of generalization and the uselessness of stereotypes.

Loveliest of all is Klimáček’s rendering of national nostalgia, even in those who thought of themselves as too sensible for such things. There’s a scene where a young couple gradually accepts this new emotion:

She, a person who could not stand folklore back home! It was she who would turn the radio off the moment she heard fiddles being played by the folk musicians....In Canada the situation changed. If Milan came across Slovak folk music on the radio, he would turn the sound up. They would listen, and tears would flow from their eyes: this was the effect of emigration. But they weren’t ashamed of it. Maybe they’d become less snobbish; maybe they needed to be tested by separation to understand that this music was something like Slovak blues that peasants sang while working hard in the fields below the mountains. And that this was simply their music, and that to feel ashamed of it was embarrassing, even if it was just a song about a sun that had to be pulled down by its legs to finally bring it down.

The Hot Summer of 1968 often feels like a haphazard experiment, one that would benefit from the character development, pacing, and continuity more easily achieved with a traditional novelistic structure. But it’s also more interesting for that experimentation, and as a piece of documentary literature, it memorably portrays a rueful, at times resentful longing for the lost qualities of a home worth cherishing.

Jennifer Helinek is a freelance book reviewer specializing in titles from Central and Eastern Europe. Her reviews can also be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/InsertLiteraryPunHere.