As we inch towards the end of a year that has tested in turn the limits of our imagination, the capacities of our patience, and the extent to which we indulge our escapist tendencies, we have been encouraged to examine closely the narratives that perpetuate contemporary existence: narratives that not only exist within the pages of books, but that also thread our day to day, commanded by something as curious as it is unknown. So, in our second-to-last Book Club selection of 2020, we are thrilled to introduce a complex, mysterious, and commandingly beautiful novel by Serbian master Goran Petrović, which inquires into the infinity of literary invention in order to infer how fantasy contributes to reality.
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At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović, translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone, Deep Vellum, 2020
Goran Petrović’s At the Lucky Hand, translated from the Serbian by the late Peter Agnone, flatters the sensibilities of those enamored with the written word—within its pages, we become romantic leads and daring detectives. Our quality of “mild presence or mild absence at the same time” becomes a virtue, nearly a superpower, highly valuable to various profiteering types. In fact, the novel is Petrović’s contribution to what might be considered the devastatingly nerdy genre that animates literary theory. And yet, this is only one face of a multifaceted work. Irresistibly engaging and virtuosically crafted, At the Lucky Hand marries high theory with high drama in spaces so quiet and invisible, that their liveliness takes one completely by surprise.
Petrović strikes a winning balance between imaginative extravagance and sober social criticism. Adam Lozanić, a somber, lonely philology student and part-time proofreader, receives a lucrative job offer from a mysterious couple; he must revise a memorial already long out of print. The book, expensively self-published, contains six hundred pages of description with no plot or characters to speak of. Adam and his employers are practitioners of a sort of reading analogous to lucid dreaming, in which they can meet other readers enjoying the same book at the same time and explore the universe of the text in all the richness suggested, not explicated, by the words. The elaborately described estate, imagined by the deceased author in a state of devotion to a love no less real for having never escaped the page, provides a ripe stage. Adam and the few other readers, thrown together by happenstance, fill in the vacuums where conventional literary elements were missing. Love, murder, mystery, power, and ambition electrify places that tremble on the edge of existence and people who, by all appearances, sit in chairs moving nothing but their eyeballs.
Jelena, characterized mainly by her pleasant smell, fervent desire for escape, and careful companionship to an increasingly senile woman, unwittingly enchants the innocent Adam. But they are only the latest lovers to inhabit the home and garden. As the stories of their predecessors unfold, frustrated precisely because of the disjunction between the realities on and off the page, one yearns for Adam and Jelena to reconcile the two. However, the more decidedly a character chooses to exist inside the literary imagination, the more they develop a noble purity outside of it. Adam and Jelena learn what the more seasoned readers already know: that they neither need nor want anything of “real” life. The very food that nourishes them is cooked in fictional kitchens and the money they exchange in long-shuttered shops appears from memories of long-defunct banks. Using nothing, they are useful to no one, and the talismans that give them access to their imaginations are the only means one has to influence them.
The story of Jelena’s senile charge and an old communist spy exemplifies the contrast between imagination’s purity and life’s baseness. Having fallen in love with her in their youth and failed to attract her attention away from the memorial’s author, he passed decades trying to employ the typical manipulative mechanisms of the Communist regime to exert control. But in the eyes of the regime, she was completely uninteresting—certainly not criminal—and it had nothing to offer her. Finding her dead in the fictional estate, he reflects upon his inability to infiltrate her life while reproducing the same unsuccessful behavior:
. . . he only reached out his hand and closed Natalija’s eyes, confining all which was still reflected in them: the French park, the contours of the forked trails, the crowns of the hundred-year-old oak trees, a distant flock of birds, that entire domain, and even his own mournful countenance, his very self. And then he again went down among the flowerbeds, sank to his knees, and remorsefully continued to tend to the seedlings in the garden . . .
The readers’ detachment becomes significant against the backdrop of violent power struggles that Serbia has suffered throughout the twentieth century. The false binary between the real and the imaginary provides an artful foundation from which to glance sidelong at the enormous—but peripheral—topics of war and politics. War is a gap, a silence, a pause in an otherwise richly animated space. “Sometimes I would merely pass beside the building that had been cleft in two by the bombardment, and could be neither demolished nor restored.” The interplay between excess and restraint in description is remarkably eloquent.
Far too often these days, words are treated as mere vehicles for other, juicier, elements of a narrative. Not so here. One could spend a pleasant hour wandering inside nearly every evocative sentence of At the Lucky Hand. “Thanks to the many tall windows in the music room,” Adam observes of the music room at night, “a good deal of daylight still lingered there.” By a simple phrasing, we’re led to marvel at this architectural feature. Often, a scene conjured by the words on the page and brought to life in our imagination causes a physical reaction. We reel, we hold our breath. We feel the heaviness, the perfume and the moisture and even the music in the air around them… or do we? We’re suddenly forced to doubt.
. . . regardless of whether they undid bone buttons, hooked clasps, snap fasteners, and wiggling garters with their lips; whether with their teeth they untied or removed white lace ribbons, black elastic bands which kept shirt sleeves from falling down, bow-like belts, and tight straps; with their teeth, so that traces of pastel chalks and violet ink would not give them away upon their return . . .
The emotion and suspense happen at the level of the sentence. The punctuation and pacing manipulate our sense of time, and yet time advances in articles of clothing. The sensual detail, the urgency, of teeth on buttons contrasts with the practicality of keeping themselves presentable. The undeniability of their desire joins the fictional setting of the lovemaking with the non-fictional setting where they would be unable to justify the marks on their cloths.
An older generation of readers die in obscurity, taking nothing with them into death and leaving nothing behind in life, having done little besides content themselves in the realm of imagination. They found their sustenance there, both spiritual and, impossibly, physical. The novel volleys the big question back to us as readers: are they tragic? The novel does not provide us with a clear answer. It looks down upon those who have rendered their imaginations inaccessible or utilitarian, but it pities those who find solace exclusively in memory and escape. The realm of fantasy has its appeal as an antidote to unrequited love and other factors that keep our desires out of reach, but can itself become that offending factor. Perhaps it seems corny to say that love is the bridge between fantasy and reality, and ideally, the scale that keeps one from outweighing the other. But if the novel tells us anything, it’s that a bit of indulgence in a beautiful idea can’t cause much harm.
Lindsay Semel is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
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