Novel
Jozef Mak
Jozef Cíger-Hronský · 1933
Synopsis
In a Slovak village, Jozef Mak, a child born out of wedlock to a mother known as the Makovka, grows up and becomes a woodcutter, then a railway worker. He loves Maruša, who loves him too, and builds a house in order to marry her, but military service takes him away; when he returns, years later, she has married his brother Jano. He then marries Jula, whom the family had said was destined to remain unmarried, and all four live under the same roof. An ordinary man, “the man-million”, he endures the blows of fate with the resilience of grass.
Context
The novel appeared in 1933. The Store norske leksikon compares its hero to Sisyphus and sees in it a decisive step towards the author's modern, expressionist prose, which plunges into the unconscious of his characters and creates modern myths. A secondary-school study sheet notes in it the struggle of man against fate, the taboo of the illegitimate child and a style laden with symbols; Visegrad Literature reads in it the link between man and nature. Banned in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1965, his books now make him one of the few major Slovak novelists translated into English.
Who it is for
A novel in a carefully wrought village language, rich in symbols and lyrical passages, readable in English.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the summit of its author's work and included in the canon of Slovak realist prose.
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