Michael Viewegh, "Fuori gioco"

Atmosphere Libri is not an Eap but actually penalizes Italians. They have chosen, in particular with the “Biblioteca dell’Acqua” series, to make foreign novels known, especially from Eastern Europe. They translate authors united by what is universal in the human being: feelings, development, growth, the sense of failure or fulfilment. So it is for the Czech Michael Viewegh, considered by many to be the new Kundera.

“Out of the game” is a novel that one reads willingly, flowing from one fast chapter to another, but that doesn’t leave you much, if not the impression of good writing. It’s not little, you will say, but it’s not all, I think.

The story unfolds around some former schoolmates who continue to meet after high school, thanks also to annual reunions. Eva is almost the stereotype of the “most beautiful in the class”, the one that everyone wants, even the teachers. She would seem more like a type than a character if it weren’t for the annoyance she feels carrying around her physicality; except that perhaps she is vaguely bisexual; except that age, in the end, also comes for her, marking her neck and breasts; except that not even she understands what she wants in life — since doing what everyone expects of her, that is marrying the other handsome one in the class, Jeff, who has “booked” her as soon as he saw her, following the rules of a childish game never denied — will not make her happy; except that, in the end, she kisses Tom in the restaurant bathroom. Above all, she will not reconcile love and sex, finding physical passion only in the elderly Professor Vartecky. Jeff gets the hand of the beauty he has “booked”, but their marriage will prove to be a failure, undermined by jealousy for the story with Vartecky. After the divorce, Jeff will find himself living with Tom, an alcoholic, in turn desperately, romantically, in love with Eva for the rest of his life, and with Skippy, a buffoonish gynecologist, who everyone believes is also a victim of the charm of the most beautiful but, in reality, is secretly homosexual, unable to come out and forced to act macho. Then there is Hurejovà, the Know-it-all, in my opinion the most successful character. Know-it-all is the classic ugly nerd of the class. She would give everything she has to have Eva’s body, her hair, her soaring boobs, her smooth movements. She, on the other hand, wears lenses, has dull hair, a too big butt, a tired and unhappy father.

“For ugly girls like me the only measure of all things sooner or later becomes beauty. Since my first three years, at the sandbox in the park, I choose the point from which to enjoy the best view. I never play near garbage cans, not me. I choose the ice cream based on the color, so that it matches at least a little the clothes I’m wearing. But do you realize? A little girl with glasses, wearing baggy blue corduroy pants, doesn’t order pistachio ice cream, even if she wants to, because she’s afraid the colors don’t match… Nothing has such bad taste, moreover, to combine green and blue. Can you even remotely imagine the fears of a twelve-year-old girl, utterly charmless, who can afford no more imperfections?”

Sure that no one will ever have sex with her, except “around midnight and after many beers”, Hurejovà dedicates herself to masturbation, while dreaming of Tom, the partner she loves, even though she knows he is in love, like and more than anyone else, with Eva, and meanwhile she invents an imaginary boyfriend, Libor, whose habits and flaws she knows by heart. The Know-it-all will assist her dying father, with a love without fuss, tinged with tenderness and repulsion, and therefore even more heartbreaking. The Know-it-all will marry Boris, loving him differently from Tom, crying because he’s not the man of her dreams, crying because he’s just a shy subway attendant, a yellow line worker, who croaks his announcements every day with desperate resignation: the resignation of the vanquished, the honest, the good.

There is also the Author, among the characters, who tells us brief sections of his life, in many ways similar to that of his creatures, a loser’s youth, adolescent loves, disappointments, redemptions, the need to keep afloat.

None of the now forty-year-olds who meet at class dinners is happy, none is really what he would have liked to be. Life doesn’t keep its promises, especially for those who expect something from it, only those already defeated survive, those who get by. Some leave the scene early, go “out of the game”, as claimed by the author’s grandmother (suggesting the idea for the novel) and the author himself when he says “by now it has begun for us too”. It is the life that has begun, the life that disappoints you, takes you away, which is also made up of death, like the suicide of ugly Irena or the accident with Karel.

“I love a subway watchman and I continue to feel the urgent need to justify myself. It’s strange: theoretically I know that life is unpredictable, variegated and multiform, that it rebels against simplifications and so on, but every time I seriously come across the slightest hint of a real variety of life forms, I am usually caught off guard.”

This novel appeals to those who prefer a difficult narrative that forces you to constant attention, to a reconstruction of the plot. Skilfully, taking you from one chapter to another with apparent lightness, it not only changes the point of view and the perspective from which it narrates, but also makes time leaps, advancing the plot in an imperceptible but fundamental way. It is also liked by those who want to be confronted with the crudeness of feelings, the mechanisms of the mind without concessions for meanness, envy, ugliness, without heroism or romanticism. There are those who praise this novel for its apparent lightness, for its irony, there are those who find it amusing. To me it seems ruthless sadness, hopeless, dry and bitter like a hangover, the same with which Tom opens and closes the story. But at certain points the cold, sharp, restrained narration tears itself apart, it is as if the author let himself be carried away, he remembered that he was a writer to all intents and purposes. They are perhaps the most beautiful moments, the most lyrical, albeit disenchanted ones and we, following the author and the characters, become like autumn leaves: dry, strident and, nevertheless, tough, resistant, attached to life despite and beyond everything.

“Inside the hospital complex, the trees are now almost devoid of leaves and among the bare branches you can glimpse the buildings that were still hidden a couple of weeks ago. The leaves have dried and hardened, every gust of the cold November wind makes them screech on the asphalt; in many places only small piles of brown dust remain, but under the cherry tree next to the pavilion where dad is hospitalized the last vivid colors still resist: a warm yellow and carmine. I catch them with my eyes as if they represent my last hope.”