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Worhtlessness by Jan Pavel Lulu
book review by Carolyn Davis
"Outside he heard the voices of a foreign city. Of a world that cannot be liked, but has to be dealt with like some necessary evil."
This English version of a work first published in 2009 in the Czech Republic, and subsequently translated into Portuguese, is a collection of eight short stories. The reader is left with a sense of the existentialism of the title; worthlessness is as subjective as the situations that the characters experience. Samples of the subjects are teenagers going through sometimes horrific, sometimes humorous, rites of passage, a not-so "good time girl" paying her "dues" to a man who is trapped socially, a family in predictable, frequent, but ultimately forgiving conflict and cooperation, and an employee who must service his female boss–who is a "boss" by many definitions.
The vignettes sometimes reflect a sense of personal helplessness or inevitability; almost always senses of irony, sometimes triumph. The attitudes that the characters adopt to cope are reminiscent of T.H. White's definition of "the seventh sense," that adult humans know that in life there are severe inequities, inconsistencies, and lies. Humankind comprises simultaneously perpetrators and victims of social unfairness, so to live with ourselves we develop a type of social rudder that helps to guide us through life's problems and choices.
Pavel identifies and describes issues swiftly and deftly. Many of the characters seem to be underdeveloped intentionally so that anyone might fit into the vignette. The situations are the foci of the stories; the characters are everyone.
A caveat for young readers and those who are particularly sensitive: there are some detailed descriptions of sex, as well as emotional and physical cruelty.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review