The bass saxophone Book

This slim volume gathers together two novellas by Czech writer, Josef Škvorecký, both of which were written in the mid 1960s. At this time, Škvorecký was considered a dissident and earlier books of his had been banned. Following the events of 1968, he would leave Czechoslovakia for good. His love for saxophones and jazz and his descriptions of music put me in mind of Julio Cortázar. Both novellas are modernist in their construction, featuring many rambling, improvised, two to three page paragraphs, influenced no doubt by modern jazz composition. Cave lector!: in common with other Central European fiction that I've read from this period, it's far from politically correct and highly chauvinistic.

The first is Emöke, originally called The Legend of Emöke. It concerns the "intellectual" but cynical narrator's brief infatuation with the titular Emöke, an ingenuous and fragile Hungarian single mother whom he meets at a holiday camp in Czechoslovakia. How can the cognisant reader not be reminded of Ferenc Karinthy's Epepe (published in the Anglophone world as Metropole), also named for its love interest? Both protagonists blow their chances with the young women concerned and come to regret it. In Emöke, the narrator plays with the heady power of sexual and romantic attraction only to find it blow up in his face. This account of a people's republic at play brings to life a strange, lost world.

The Bass Saxophone was written the year before the Prague Spring. This time the setting is Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. It's a dream-like tale featuring the titular instrument, a kind of mythical creature that enchants the narrator, and a travelling septet of shabby outsider musicians (one is a hunchback, another legless and so on - only the female singer is physically perfect) led by one Lothar Kinze. The narrator somehow finds himself on stage with this ragged ensemble, playing the bass saxophone to an assembly of Nazi dignitaries before being dragged off and replaced by the instrument's owner. And that's it, really. Jazz was a symbol of freedom for dissidents in the communist East - think of the allure of the young saxophonist in Ida. It fulfils the same role here under Nazism. Totalitarian regimes don't like jazz; it defies their discipline. The vast valve instrument blows a ground-shaking raspberry at the murderous, thieving invader.