Ordinary Lives.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Ordinary Lives was first published in Prague in 2004 as Obyejné zivotny. The novel reintroduces the character of Daniel Smirický, from the Czech town of Kostelec. Danny appeared first in Škvorecký’s debut novel, The Cowards (1958), which, like all of the writer’s fictions, was banned by the Communist regime. He later makes appearances in The Engineer of Human Souls (the Governor General’s Award winner for fiction in 1984), The Miracle Game (1972), and When Eve Was Naked (2000), all translated from the Czech. Danny (who can be considered Škvorecký’s alter ego) is an emigrant, now living, as does the author, in Toronto. He is the narrator in the novel, presenting events of the two high school reunions which form the structure of Ordinary Lives. The first occurs in 1963, during the Communist control of the state; the second, 30 years later, brings those left of the group up to 1993, following the fall of the Soviet Union. But the structure of Škvorecký’s fiction serves as little more than a container for the memories, the “ungovernable river of thoughts,” which are the true subjects of the novel. Spanning two totalitarian regimes, Nazism and Communism, the lives of the former classmates contain nostalgia mixed with a realism born out of terrifying personal histories. Some have survived the concentration camp. Some know of those who did not. Škvorecký’s strengths are those of a storyteller who understands what life asks of us and who has the sensibility to interpret both its horrors and pleasures.

The pages of notes at the end of Ordinary Lives relate and connect the events in the novel with events in earlier works. Asked in an interview by Randy Boyagoa of the Walrus about these notes, Škvorecký said that he “wrote the notes to inform newcomers to my fiction about my characters that travel from novel to novel, and also because Canadian readers don’t know much about World War II as seen from the other side of the front lines.” Škvorecký is now 85, arguably one of Canada’s greatest novelists. This is his first novel to appear in English since 1996. It is a must-read.