LOVERS AND MURDERERS

Written 30 years ago, this Rabelaisian and restless novel from Czech mountebank Páral, a contemporary of Milan Kundera, describes the lives of the inhabitants of a chemical factory's employee-housing complex. Story lines often involve competition for coveted space in the building, and they intersect in perversely coincidental ways as the chronicle unfolds across decades. For instance, siblings Madda, Alex and Julda live together until Julda discovers Madda and Alex in flagrante delicto and throws Madda out, forcing her to live with neighbors. The neighbors' adolescent son develops an obsessive crush on physically filthy but intensely sexual Madda, but she's not interested in him. Finally, the boy commits a violent act that solves his romantic problem, at least symbolically. In another apartment, aging beauty Zita recaptures her passion in adultery. Elsewhere, young Jana lives innocently, eventually marrying Borek, an itinerant worker living in the building. The book follows this marriage for many years, until a new generation arrives and makes the same mistakes as its predecessor. The novel's playful, relentless energy combines with sexual and political candidness to make grand, cartoonish comedy of a bleak situation. Páral integrates characters' daydreams with his narrative, in turn mixing these with bursts of stream of consciousness that deepen his provocative probing of characters' psyches. The sociological oppression of the factory workers and the unfair division of wealth become part of the comedy as well. Although the translation is at times clunky, Cravens generally brings out the poetry in Páral's original, inspired epic of life in Eastern Europe. (Feb. 1)