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An introduction to the work of acerbic Slovak writer Peter Macsovszky.

Simon Blef, who comes from “a small, stifling country without a sea” in some corner of Europe, has gone to live in the Netherlands. There he has found a wife and hopes he may yet find work. He is making preparations: he carries around a notebook and jots down his thoughts. One day he would like to write a novel, but in the meantime, he records, embellishes, invents, and combines what he sees with what he dreams: the happy, hard-working Dutch, with their seventy-year-old hippies—the “superannuated generation of rockers”— and their new “sexless generation,” as well as the tourists and immigrants from beyond the seven seas.

Set in a single day, Making Skeletons Dance is full of impressionistic musings, in equal measure mordant and humorous. Simon has left his small unhappy country to get away from the past—but how is it that the past is so devilishly resourceful, liable to turn up in any Amsterdam pub? As the afternoon wears on, the drama of his life unfolds in fascinating detail, be it comedy or tragedy, or both.

The novel Martin Kacur, which dates from 1907, tells the engrossing story of a young schoolteacher who moves from one provincial Slovene town to the next, trying to enlighten his countrymen and countrywomen but instead receiving only the mistrust and scorn of the traditional-minded and petty population. The novel is ruthless in its analysis and self-analysis of the failure of this abstract idealist. Brilliant descriptions of Slovenia’s natural beauty alternate with the haze of alcoholic despair, rural violence, marital alienation, and the death of a young and beloved child. The Slovene prose writer, poet, and dramatist Cankar’s characterizations of duplicitous political and religious leaders (the village priest, the mayor, other teachers, doctors, etc.) and the treacherous social scene are remarkable in their engaging clarity. No doubt the raw emotional impact of Martin Kacur derives partly from Cankar’s portrayal of the way society isolates people, denying them sympathy and solidarity. Cankar's style here owes a debt both to naturalism and to symbolism and contains, in its sometimes frantic pace and associative interior monologues, hints of early expressionism.