Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street, by Heda Margolius Kovály
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Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street, by Heda Margolius Kovály
Free PDF Ebook Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street, by Heda Margolius Kovály
This rediscovered masterpiece captures a chilling moment in the stifling early days of Communist Czechoslovakia. 1950s Prague is a city of numerous daily terrors, of political tyranny, corruption and surveillance. There is no way of knowing whether one’s neighbor is spying for the government, or what one’s supposed friend will say under pressure to a State Security agent. A loyal Party member might be imprisoned or executed as quickly as a traitor; innocence means nothing for a person caught in a government trap. When a little boy is murdered at the cinema, the ensuing investigation sheds a little too much light on the personal lives of the cinema’s female ushers, each of whom is hiding a dark secret of her own.
Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street, by Heda Margolius Kovály- Amazon Sales Rank: #595744 in Books
- Published on: 2015-06-02
- Released on: 2015-06-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.54" h x .93" w x 5.72" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Review Praise for Innocence; or, Murder on Steep StreetAn NPR Best Book of 2015"A luminous testament from a dark time, Innocence is at once a clever hommage to Raymond Chandler, and a portrait of a city—Prague—caught and held fast in a state of Kafkaesque paranoia. Only a great survivor could have written such a book."—John Banville"The great draw of Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street is the menacing view it gives us of communist Prague . . . Kovály channels Chandler but takes him into a landscape far, far away from wide-open L.A." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "An extraordinary novel . . . A remarkable work of art with the intrigue of a spy puzzle, the irony of a political fable, the shrewdness of a novel of manners, and the toughness of a hard-boiled murder mystery."—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal"A sharp, moving indictment of Soviet-style communism, and of any ideology that relies on fear to subdue." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune "The plot is easy to envision as film noir . . . As for innocence, the woman who went to hell twice wants her readers to know that there is no such thing."—The Times Literary Supplement"There is a great deal over which to marvel in Innocence: or, Murder on Steep Street. The narrative is riveting. The art of its telling is powerful. And the back story to its publication is itself worthy of recounting: a testament to the author’s steely will to hallow memory and, in so doing, bring a semblance of balance to history’s often skewed scales of justice."—Canadian Jewish News"Purely Chandleresque." —Toronto Star “Kovály's prose carries echoes of Albert Camus' novels . . . Yet, Innocence is astonishingly—and brilliantly—written as a thriller in the style of Raymond Chandler, an author Kovály hugely admired. The mean streets her characters tread are infinitely more treacherous than the dark blocks of Los Angeles but she creates a plot packed with surprise, a character-driven, murderous matrix that sustains an amoral universe in an all-too-convincing story.”—The Jewish Chronicle"A fantastic homage to Chandler." —The Strand Magazine "Neither the Nazis nor the Communists could silence her . . . [Innocence] reflects with great insight and accuracy on a Kafkaesque world that unfolded in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s."—The Virginia Gazette"The novel’s best aspect is its portrayal of time and place. Fear fills Prague and its residents’ hearts in the 1950s; no one can trust anyone. With many scenes occurring at nighttime, a sense of darkness spreads as the story unfolds."—San Antonio Express-News "Innocence stands as a singular addition to the genre... With this character-driven, philosophical mystery, Kovály has taken her experience and combined it with the vocabulary of classic crime fiction to create something that is engagingly familiar, yet all her own." —Rain Taxi "A remarkable story that combines cultural and political observations with crime fiction. It is a testimony to the most brutal times of the 20th century."—Lake Placid News "A lost classic . . . In Innocence nobody can claim to be very innocent." —Dayton Daily News"An uncensored look at crime in communist Czecholosovakia... I highly recommend." —Fresh Fiction "Intense and powerful." —Crimespree Magazine "An intriguing reimagining of the crime genre in the context of Prague in the 1950s. Kovály does take from Chandler a focus on the real conditions of the lives of her contemporaries, but Kovály’s Prague in 1952, under Soviet totalitarianism, is a very different place than Chandler’s 1940s Los Angeles, under corrupt, bankrupt capitalism . . . In the trivializing of evil lies the link between Kovály’s Holocaust memoir and Innocence, as well as the dark undertone that makes her crime novel so distinctive and powerful." —The Life Sentence "An intensely interesting novel . . . The central premise, that innocence is neither protection nor excuse in a darkly corrupt world, remains a bitter truth."—Reviewing the Evidence "Margolius Kovály’s vision of 1950s Prague is marked not only by terror, but by shame and humiliation as well. Her heroine must be both fearless and shameless to get even close to achieving her goals, but this is a Soviet noir, so don’t count on a happy ending. Do, however, count on beautiful, intricate, and bleak noir from a master of the genre." —MysteryPeople Bookstore "Capturing the fear and oppression of living in a police state, this dark novel, reflective of its time and written by a writer who lived her material, will enthrall noir enthusiasts and readers of literary historical fiction."—Library Journal"In noirish tones, [Innocence] depicts the dark streets, the lost souls, and a very difficult time to be judged guilty or innocent by one’s supposed friends or by the oppressive and rising Czechoslovakian Communist regime."—Booklist"Previously unpublished in English, this mystery by the late Czech translator and author of the memoir Under a Cruel Star vividly depicts Communist-oppressed 1950s Prague . . . That Kovaly's first husband was unjustly executed by the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1952 gives her narrative of double lives and betrayal a painful veracity."—Publishers Weekly“Double lives, secrets, informers, microdots, and above all, lies . . . Set in post-war Prague, a repressive political maze, Innocence is a must-read, a psychological drama played out in crystal prose. Not only did Heda Margolius Kovály write an emotionally wrenching tale, she lived it during the 1950s Communist state.”—Cara Black"Kovály’s skill as a mystery writer shines, as she uses suspense, hints, and suggestions to literally play with the reader’s mind . . . An excellent novel."—New York Journal of BooksPraise for Under a Cruel Star“This is an extraordinary memoir, so heartbreaking that I have reread it for months, unable to rise to the business of ‘reviewing’ less a book than a life repeatedly outraged by the worst totalitarians in Europe. Yet it is written with so much quiet respect for the minutiae of justice and truth that one does not know where and how to specify Heda Kovály’s splendidness as a human being.”—The New York Times Book Review“Given thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious young student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one.”—Clive James, Cultural Amnesia“One of the outstanding autobiographies of the century.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A masterpiece of memoir still awaiting its due.” —The American Interest “Kovály's attention to the world’s beauty, even while in hell, is so brazen as to take my breath away.” —Columbia Journalism Review "A tragic story told with aplomb, humor and tenderness . . . Highly recommended."—Publishers Weekly"An exceptionally intimate and poignant memoir . . . Illuminating."—Library Journal
About the Author Heda Margolius Kovály, a Czech writer and translator, was born in 1919 in Prague to Jewish parents. Under a Cruel Star, Kovály’s memoir of her time in Auschwitz and the early years of Czechoslovak communism, was first published in 1973 and has since been translated into many languages all over the world. Her crime novel, Innocence, is based in large part on her own experiences in early 1950s Prague. Kovály died in 2010 at age 91.Alex Zucker has translated novels by Czech authors Jáchym Topol, Miloslava Holubová, Petra Hůlová, and Patrik Ouředník. He has received an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, an NEA Literary Fellowship, and the ALTA National Translation Award. Alex lives in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Visit his website at www.alexjzucker.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1I got off the tram at Můstek and walked the rest of the way. It was a windy day in early spring, the kind when a person ought to be out in a field or in the woods, and every moment not spent boxed-up indoors is precious. Even though I was in a rush, I took the time to stop and look at a couple of shop windows. So what? No use driving myself crazy over another minute or two. I was in for a tough shift today anyway. Me, always so careful to stay out of conflict and keep to myself. Of all people, why did the boss have to go and pick me? A curtain of shadow dropped behind me as I stepped into the cinema lobby. I swiveled my head to look at the display case for Fotografia, the state-run photography studio. A bride in a veil holding a bouquet. The same one for six months now. When they first put her up she looked beautiful. Now her blissful smile had turned as sour as yesterday’s milk. A moment in time, snared in a lasso, strangled as it tried to escape. To the left, set in a long blank wall, was the gray-painted metal door that led to the projection booth. I stopped a moment, hesitating. Janeček, poor guy, was in for a tongue-lashing from the boss, and maybe the head office too. Twenty-eight and single, with six years’ experience as a projectionist, he had turned up four months ago with a recommendation from the job placement office. Didn’t talk to a soul. None of the ushers had managed to break him. Those girls tried every trick in the book. Especially Marie. She was eating her heart out having an unmarried man within reach who wouldn’t climb in the sack with her. Janeček was a good worker, too, punctual and polite. God only knows what got into him yesterday. Must have mixed up the reels or something. The movie started halfway through, in the middle of a chase scene: cars speeding around the curve, tires squealing, faces flashing past. At first the audience figured it for an unusually creative opening sequence, but then the whistling started. The boss was out of town at a conference for three days. She called after the screening to see if everything went all right, and when Marie told her about the slipup, the boss asked to talk to me. “Listen, Helena, tomorrow’s my last day of meetings. You’re the only one there with any brains. Will you talk to Janeček for me? He won’t take it so hard coming from you. Try to be tactful, but make sure you get the message across. Either he does his job right or I find a replacement. There’s plenty of projectionists out there, and good ones too. You think he drinks? Take a look around the booth, if you don’t mind. I’m sure if he’s got any bottles up there, he’ll clear them out before I get back. All right, thanks for handling this. I’ll give you a call back tomorrow.” As soon as someone flatters you for your brains, you know trouble’s coming. Marie could get through to Janeček much better and quicker than I ever could. What did brains have to do with it? But the manager had asked me, and when the boss told us to do something, we jumped. It never even crossed my mind to tell her no. The manager was so self-assured she didn’t even hide the fact that she was over forty. Though she easily could have. She was still a knockout, and the way she dressed, when she crossed the street, every eye was glued to her, as tubby Ládinka, our homeliest usher, said with a sigh every time. The boss’s husband was a famous surgeon, and the looks he gave her after twenty years of marriage were the kind most gals only get about two months before their wedding and three months afterward. She didn’t work for the money, of course. She did it because she felt like it, so every door was open to her and people fell all over themselves to get in her good graces. Everything she did was like some precious gift to the world; for her, the cinema wasn’t the daily grind it was for the rest of us working stiffs, for whom the job was just a way to earn a living. But in spite of the gap between us, in spite of the boss’s imported dresses and the big shiny car waiting for her out in front of the cinema every night, most of us didn’t envy her. Somehow she gave the impression it was all in the natural order of things. People tend to think of happiness like a cake: if one person gets a bigger slice, it means less for everyone else. But our boss seemed to be one of those creatures that can only exist in a state of happiness and prosperity, like a deep-sea fish that can only survive at the bottom of the ocean and anywhere else it would die. If it was true, as I’d always believed, that life was like a game of bridge—to win, you needed to know the rules and how to play the game, but you also had to be dealt a decent hand—then the boss got all the trumps. But besides that, or maybe in spite of it, she was a wise woman, and fair, and all of us ushers were grateful for that, so we bent over backwards to do what she asked. Which was why right now I was obediently trotting down the hall to that ugly gray door, even though it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do. If only Janeček weren’t such an oddball. The only person he was on friendly terms with was Josef, Marie’s eight-year-old nephew, her sister Žofie’s son. Žofie worked shifts in a factory, so Josef came to see Marie practically every day. And of course for a boy like him a film projector was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It was just “Hi, Marie,” and whoosh, off he went, up the stairs to the booth. It was good for the kid. At least he wasn’t just loafing around, and he might even learn something useful. The two of them got on surprisingly well. Janeček never talked down to him either, always spoke to him man to man. He must’ve been a good person, at heart, to like kids like that. Well, here we go.I opened the door without knocking to find Janeček standing there, leaning against the wall. I hoped he wasn’t drunk. Better get this over with quick. “Hello, Mr. Janeček. The boss called to say the conference won’t wrap up till tomorrow. She heard what happened yesterday and wanted to know if you could explain.” Janeček didn’t even blink, just stared at a dusty table littered with a half-eaten roll, a dirty rag, a big pair of scissors for cutting film, some empty movie reels, and assorted other junk. Strange little cubbyhole, I thought uneasily. I’d go off my rocker in here after a week. Murky light, rickety floorboards, dirt on every surface. Janeček acted like he didn’t even notice. Must have a pretty good hangover. He looks like death warmed over. Jesus, I’ve got to get out of here, this guy gives me the creeps. Did he even hear what I said? Why isn’t he answering? Maybe he’s too upset. “Try not to take it too hard, Mr. Janeček. These things happen. Just let me know what to tell the boss when she calls back.” Janeček kept his lip buttoned. “After all, it’s not a catastrophe, right? I mean sure, you made a mistake, but it can happen to anyone. It’s not a matter of life and death.” I forced a laugh. What was I babbling? Janeček gazed blankly past me at the wall. Finally he dropped his eyes back to the cluttered tabletop and snapped: “You tell the boss this. Tell her anyone can make a mistake. We wouldn’t want anything worse to happen. And tell her I can guarantee it’ll never happen again. You make sure you tell her that. Tell her it’ll never happen again, I guarantee.” “Well, all right. In any case I’m sure she’ll want to speak with you when she gets back. Just be careful from now on. And forget about it, you know? It’s not as if someone got shot.”Thank God I’m out of there, I thought as I left Janeček in the projection room. I nodded to the box-office girl and unhooked the rope barring access to the stairs. I walked downstairs and turned down the hall toward the staff cloakroom to change into my uniform. Even before I reached the door, I could already hear the voices inside, cackling and chattering over each other like barnyard hens. Good lord, at it again with the nasty gossip. Another one of those days. I opened the door. Marie stood in the middle of the tiny room, her eyes red, with bags underneath so big you could put groceries in them. She was sobbing at the top of her lungs, a man’s handkerchief bunched in her hand. Whenever she had a serious cold, or a serious heartache, she used a handkerchief left behind by one of her ex-lovers. The other ushers stood in a circle around her, mouths agape. “For God’s sake, girls, what’s going on in here?” I said. “It’s half past two, you should be out on the floor, we’ll be opening the doors soon.” “You’re not gonna believe it,” Líba said. “Marie’s nephew is missing!” The whole commotion started back up again. “Will all of you just shut up for a minute? Now tell me, Marie, what happened?” “Well,” Marie whimpered, “Žofie had a shift yesterday afternoon, so her boy Josef said he was comin’ over here. Sometimes I don’t feel like draggin’ him all the way over the bridge to Žofie’s and makin’ the trip back home again, so he just brings his schoolbag with him, sleeps over at my place, and goes straight to school in the morning. So when yesterday he was a no-show, I just figured he went to stay at the Musils’, since he’s friends with their son, little Petr, from school, and his mom works at the factory too, so when she’s home sometimes she takes the boys, and when Žofie’s got the morning shift Petr comes over to her place. So, like I said, I figured Josef was at the Musils’ and Žofie figured he was with me.” “So but this morning . . .” tubby Ládinka jumped in. Of all the girls she had the lowest tolerance for awkward moments of silence. “This morning Žofie calls Marie here—” “—and she says, Hi, Marie, thanks for takin’ my boy last night. You know if he got his math homework done? And I say, What’re you talkin’ about? Josef never came over, I thought he was with the Musils. And she says, Jesus, are you serious? Anna’s got a sore throat and dropped Petr off at her sister’s, so where could my boy be? She goes tearin’ over to school and no sign of him there. She already called the police. Nobody’s seen the kid since yesterday afternoon. Last one to lay eyes on him was Vejvodová, in the food mart ’cross the street. She says he stopped in around half past one for an ice cream bar, and his schoolbag’s still at home.” “That isn’t entirely correct, Miss Vránová,” said a voice, and everyone turned to see a powerfully built, tan-faced man in a dark suit with a silver crew cut standing in the door. His eyes, round and bright, stood out against his dark skin like the opening in the lens of an old-fashioned camera. He wasn’t tall, but his frame filled the doorway. He took a step inside. “I’m Captain Nedoma,” he said, pausing before he went on. “Miss Šulcová saw the Vrba boy in here yesterday afternoon, just before two. Right upstairs here, at the snack bar. He bought another ice cream.” The silence was so complete you could hear everyone breathe. Then tubby Ládinka stammered: “But, but, the box office girl doesn’t even come in till two. The only one here before then is . . .” “That’s right, normally there’s only one person here before two p.m. We’ve informed your manager. They’re driving her over from headquarters right now. The Horizon will be closed for today, but don’t anyone go anywhere. You can have a seat in the smoking lounge. Comrade Dolejš here will wait with you. Miss Vránová, you stay here.” He jerked his head into the hallway and a blond beanpole of a man emerged from behind him with a badly healed broken nose and a suspicious bulge in his jacket. We marched single file out of the staff cloakroom and—right face, hut!—turned into the smoking lounge. The beanpole settled in on a hard chair in the corner, looking as if he planned to spend the rest of his life there. All of us lit up as if on command, even the girls who didn’t normally smoke. The folds under tubby Ládinka’s chin started trembling. Mrs. Kouřimská turned her back to the officer, crossed herself, folded her hands in her lap, and shut her eyes. Marie, our resident authority on matters of love, had this to say about Mrs. Kouřimská: “She’s livin’ proof of how stupid guys are. Look at her: not a lick of makeup,sweaters faded and washed out, skirts worn through at the seat, and still looks like she just stepped off a pedestal at that whatchamacallit in Paris, the Loover. Ever since she got widowed, though, she’s been all on her own. Just sits out in the park on Žofín every night in summer, watchin’ the young lovers neck out the corner of her eye.” It was true. Even at fifty Mrs. Kouřimská radiated the kind of eternal beauty you don’t see too much in this world, so it tends to scare people off. It was unfamiliar, almost mysterious. None of us would ever have dreamed of calling her “Karla.” We treated her with respect, and called her “missus,” the same as the customers. Sitting in the smoking lounge at the Horizon with the door shut, you couldn’t hear anything from the next room over, let alone from upstairs. We thought it was impossible, but we perked up our ears all the same, sitting on the edge of our seats. It felt like something might happen at any moment—maybe Josef would come bursting in, laughing about how scared we all looked and, boy, did he put one over on us, or suddenly there might be a scream or a gunshot. When you’re that wound up, you always expect some kind of loud noise, something to match your inner tension, to balance it out and calm you down so the earth can settle back into its regular rotation. But the only thing that happened was the manager walked in, pale and on the verge of fainting, followed by the man with the silver crew cut. They said we could all go home now. And that was that. There wasn’t a trace of Marie in the cloakroom, and a bunch of cops in uniform stood at the top of the stairs. The door to Janeček’s cubbyhole was propped open, and inside, two handyman types in plainclothes were bent over the floor. Next to them sat a stack of pried-up floorboards, the same ones I’d felt wobble under my feet a few hours earlier. The next day it was all over the papers:Twenty-eight-year old Jiří Janeček, previously convicted for sexual offenses, lured eight-year-old Josef Vrba into the projection booth at the Horizon Cinema and attempted to sexually assault him. When the boy resisted, the suspect stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors for splicing film and hid the body under the floor. The suspect, who was just released from prison five months ago, did not resist arrest. The boy’s mother had a nervous breakdown and is currently receiving treatment in the hospital.Our manager may not have had a breakdown herself, but she sure came close. She called me into her office and brewed me a cup of coffee with her very own two hands. “My God, Helena, forgive me! I sent you in there with that insane killer and the whole time he had a dead child under the floor and heaven knows what was going through that head of his when you—he could’ve . . . Lord have mercy! And poor little Josef, such a nice boy, always so cheerful . . .” We sat together a good long while, crying into our coffee. Twenty-nine years ago, by some terrible accident, two cells that should never have met joined to create something that should never have existed—a little slip of nature, happens all the time. And as those cells divided and grew and multiplied, that little discrepancy crystallized inside them. Maybe it was something you could see. Maybe a little black dot, the size of the head of a pin, and if I were a brain surgeon I could point to it with the tip of my scalpel and say to my assistant: “There, you see? That tiny spot on the cortex? That’s the death of Josef Vrba, age eight, of Prague.” So you see, we can’t blame Mr. Janeček. He wasn’t any more responsible than the pair of scissors he used to commit the awful crime. The whole thing was caused by that little dot on his brain.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. A Historical Literary Masterpiece By knittingmom Being of Czech decent, I was thrilled to be able to read Innocence; or Murder on Steep Street by Heda Margolius Kovály a powerfully written novel, which nearly did not exist due to censorship. Kovály introduces the reader to the early days of Communist Czechoslovakia via life in Prague during the 1950s, a city filled with loyalist Party members, corruption, tyranny, and constant surveillance, for one could never know if a family member or a neighbor will turn them in, these are considered “small terrors”. Kovály adds in a “big terror” with the case of a young boy murdered in a cinema and as the investigation unfolds, the lives of the female ushers come under intense scrutiny, each of whom harbors a secret of her own. What one must remember throughout this fantastic book is that Kovály is portraying history, life under a Communist regime, one must remember this is during the Cold War and written shortly after the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état, which put the communists (KSČ) into complete power. If one goes into this book expecting a simple murder mystery, one will most likely be disappointed, as Kovály is providing the reader insight into what it was like for average citizens during this very oppressive time in history. Communism happens to be my area of expertise and Kovály does not disappoint, rather she managed to craft together an exceptional atmospheric work of historical fiction and I am very grateful the censors did not destroy this historical literary masterpiece. I would recommend Innocence; or Murder on Steep Street to readers who enjoy historical fiction.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. “Everyone’s afraid of old age, and meanwhile those old grannies are happier than any of us. They’ve done their time.” By Mary Whipple (3.5 stars) In 1985, thirty years after author Heda Margolius Kovaly lived through the horrors of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of a police state, and twenty years after her escape from Czechoslovakia to the United States, she wrote Innocence, her only novel, about that period of history in the 1950s. An admirer of mystery writer Raymond Chandler, she uses Chandler’s abrupt, noir style to narrate Part I of the novel, flashing back and bringing to life some of the crimes of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia against ordinary citizens. Part II, less artificial in style, pays more attention to the psychological effects on ordinary people caught up in the maelstrom of political unrest.As Part I opens, Helena, a stand-in for the author, is working at a Prague movie theatre, where she castigates the projectionist for starting a film with the wrong reel, just a few minutes before the projectionist is arrested by police for the murder of a child. Within a few more pages, the reader learns more about Helena, whose husband of two years, Karel, is arrested after drawing a map to show another couple how to reach the weekend cottage they are sharing. The road on the map happens to go past a military installation, and the police see the map-making as subversive activity. Gradually, other characters are introduced and the tensions of the times are revealed. People living double lives, women using their bodies to obtain favors for their imprisoned families, every action being monitored, every overheard statement being conveyed to the secret police by informers, show trials and executions - all appear here.Written in imitation of the style of Raymond Chandler’s noir mysteries, Part I is filled with clichés and platitudes. Helena’s first person point of view, alternating with third person point of view elsewhere, gives a kind of immediacy to Helena’s predicaments, however, even though the reader is bombarded with similes and metaphors like, “Happiness is like a cake,” “life was like a game of bridge,” someone was “wrung out like a dishrag.” Slang, which might have passed in Chandler’s English, feels artificial in this setting and sometimes bizarre: Comments that “every sentence is a laugh riot,” and that a woman is a “piece of skirt” who “does not have the dough” to do something, or that someone else has “gone off the rails” do not feel natural. The moralizing platitudes add to the stylistic annoyance.Part II, far more sophisticated and lacking in Chandleresque affectations, emphasizes the psychological effects of this period on individuals who run afoul of the police state or who are related to people who have inadvertently found themselves involved against their will. How little persuasion it takes for people to become informants is one of the major themes, and as the subject of guilt vs. innocence becomes ever more developed, the cynicism of the period becomes clear. Everyone is isolated: “There’s alone, more alone, and most alone of all.” As two more murders take place and more people are involved in saving the lives of family, friends, or themselves from false arrest, the reader begins to understand just what people mean when they say, “There’s no such thing as an innocent person.”
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Brilliant, shocking and completely challenging novel! By ADITI SAHA “Innocence is a kind of insanity”----Graham Greene, an English novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenplay writer, travel writer and criticHeda Margolius Kovály was a Czech writer, whose book, Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street was inspired by her own life in early 1950s Socialist Prague—her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace, thus penning a political thriller cum detective novel, that is translated into English by Alex Zucker, an award winning translator.Synopsis:1950s Prague is a city of numerous small terrors, of political tyranny, corruption and surveillance. There is no way of knowing whether one’s neighbor is spying for the government, or what one’s supposed friend will say under pressure to a State Security agent. A loyal Party member might be imprisoned or executed as quickly as a traitor; innocence means nothing for a person caught in a government trap.But there are larger terrors, too. When a little boy is murdered at the cinema where his aunt works, the ensuing investigation sheds a little too much light on the personal lives of the cinema’s female ushers, each of whom is hiding a dark secret of her own.Nearly lost to censorship, this rediscovered gem of Czech literature depicts a chilling moment in history, redolent with the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Communist Czechoslovakia.From the title of the book, it is very clear that the book is divided into two parts- Innocence and Murder on Steep Street. Well, but from the synopsis, it sounds like a murder/espionage style of thriller, although that's the half of it. The larger picture of the story lies in the 1950s Prague especially the period when Prague was under the Communist rule when marking anyone, who goes beyond the government by either speaking evil in the name of government or participating in any ploy against the government or even if you have not done anything, as "dissident" and by punishing them by putting them on life imprisonment. The author, herself, was a victim of this era, and telling this personal story brings alive those gruesome vivid details of the period with a sharp, raw voice in this part-thriller-part-historical-fiction novel.So while reading especially while reviewing this book, please do not take this book as a mystery novel even for a single bit, since it doesn't only contain a mystery that unravels in an nontraditional manner but also it is hidden under multiple layers of history, which is indirectly proportional to the murder mystery.Helena Nováková gets a job as an usher at the Horizon Cinema in Prague, when her husband was imprisoned for espionage. Helena too herself is under suspicion and the government put spies around her to keep eyes on her activities. Helena is ripped apart by the choices of whether to save the life of her beloved by risking hers or whether to let go. The first half of the story tells the readers about how innocent lives were torn apart by the Communist government, how each one fought against not will against the government but also against their souls to protect themselves from the government who terrorized the whole nation. The insightful picture that the author sketched during this period of Communist Prague is of the want of freedom against the victimization towards mortality without guilt.The second half opens with the murder followed by a drastic change of narrative from first person POV of Helena to third person POV of other key characters while Helena takes the back seat. This time the author narrated about the murder where the victim is an unidentified person, I mean the author deliberately kept the identity under wrap and since the murder took place right in front of the Horizon Cinema, all the employees are under the probable suspect list. This part sees the entry of yet another brilliant character of this book, Vendyš, a police detective who too being honest, is a victim of political corruption and tyranny of this communist government.The story from the second half takes an 180 degree turn of being stead to being fast paced and the way the author teased her readers with the mystery by throwing little hints and turns at the beginning to totally throwing the readers off their edges by introducing unexpected twists, definitely puts the book into an intriguing page turner category. The writing style is one of a kind- purely honest and sheerly engaging. The story builds up like a maze- when the reader thinks he found the way, is actually the time when he falls deeper into this mystical puzzle.The book has this much amount of unexpected hidden twists and turns that it is enough to kill the readers with anticipation. The author never once openly or positively talked about the mystery, since she keeps on introducing one new suspect after another and the way she addresses each one of them is another complex thing that urges the readers many a times to look what they read before one particular chapter. The book feels like walking in the mist, you can see the light yet you can't reach it without proper direction.Although for die-hard thriller fans, the climax might come as a disappointing shock since the author wrapped it up in a rather different way than it happens in a regular thriller novel. So be prepared for the climax- not something too satisfying yet something that completely justifies the overall story.The timeline as well as the backdrop is surprisingly very striking. Since the story is a personal one, so each and every details comes alive in this book since the author had portrayed the backdrop in an intricate fashion and it also seems like she had an eye for tiniest of tiny details that finally reproduces a brilliant background for this story. Teleport would be the wrong word to describe how I felt while reading this novel, instead I would stress on the fact that I was instantly time traveled to yet another remarkable yet painful era in our history in a completely different yet beautiful land called Prague.This novel is a brilliant example of something very challenging that engages each and every brain cells of the readers to contemplate in their own way and also of something which is thoroughly insightful enough to show the readers a dark picture of the reality as well as of the human souls.Verdict: In one word, a must read, only if you can handle complexities and multi layers in a plot.
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