A Review of Bianca Bellová’s The Lake (2022, Parthian Books)

The Lake opens with a childhood memory: Nami, our narrator, stands on a dock on a lake with his grandmother, grandfather, and a woman made up of “three red triangles.” Nami remembers being pushed into the lake by his grandfather and that night, when he becomes violently ill, the woman of the three triangles holds his head as he vomits. In the morning, she is gone. The recollection has the hazy and fuzzy quality that childhood memories often have; the three red triangles are the woman’s bikini, but she remains faceless. Later, it becomes clear to Nami, and to us, that there is something fishy about the woman and the lake. We learn that the lake is making the townspeople sick. Nami embarks on a journey to discover the truth about the other mystery, the one about the faceless woman.

Bianca Bellová’s The Lake, translated into English by Alex Zucker, follows Nami as he navigates childhood and young adulthood in a fictitious land made brutal by environmental degradation and Russian occupiers. The Czech author, who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia during the so-called period of normalization in the 1970s, is known for her works that explore themes relating to the communist era. Sentimental Novel (Sentimentální roman) describes growing up near the end of the communist regime, while Dead Man (Mrtvý muž) is about a traumatized family during the normalization period. The Lake (Jezero), published in Czech in 2016 and the recipient of the EU Prize for Literature and the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year award, has found success in further examining the human psyche and interpersonal relationships under totalitarianism.

The Lake has been described by some critics as a dystopian novel, but to anyone who has lived under communism in the Soviet era – or under Russian occupation today – the landscapes and the cruelty experienced by the characters are all too real. There is the towering figure of the “Statesman,” an allusion to the statues of Stalin and Lenin once found in cities behind the Iron Curtain. The physical and emotional abuse perpetuated by the Russian occupiers is so pervasive that it feels commonplace to the townspeople. In addition to the violence, there are references to the comic absurdity of life under totalitarianism. In one particularly allusory scene, Nami narrates the events of Fishery Day, a celebration of the town’s fishermen.

Wind whips the last few pages of the speech the factory chairman still has left in front of him, and without further warning the sky rips open, gushing water like when Nami’s gramma empties out the washtub. As the women’s hair collapses, blue make-up streams down their faces in hydrologic maps, their high heels slipping in the mud that has suddenly formed on the square, but the chairman of the fish factory goes on speaking. The statue of the Statesman silently raises its arms to the sky.

Here, Bellová captures the farcical nature of state-mandated celebrations. Anyone who attended a May Day parade, where the mandatory celebration of workers included long-winded speeches and banner waving, can relate. I have never been to such a parade, but my grandmother attended her fair share growing up under Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. If, as a young girl, I would ever complain about waiting in a long line, she would remind me about my good fortune of having never experienced the sheer boredom at one of these socialist rituals.

The emblems of the Soviet era root the story in a past that blends reality with fiction. Yet, the ecological disaster of the lake, or the near-total absence of rain, seem to be clues about our future, a warning about the impending climate disaster if we continue down our current path. Bellová illustrates the environmental destruction of her fictional land through Nami’s teenage perspective.

The only pier that runs all the way to the fishing boats themselves is wooden; every six months the fishermen extend it a few metres further, so they won’t have to walk across the parched lakebed with their fuel canisters and baskets of fish, and to give them somewhere to tie up their boats. A few small barges are scattered across the exposed lake bottom, their cracked hulls visibly decaying in the sun.

Nami lies on the dry grass overlooking a concrete pier, at the top of a hill where years earlier the Russians erected an antenna for interplanetary communications. At that time it was still taken for granted that they would fly to other planets, establish settlements, and hopefully join forces with the extraterrestrials. They even learned about it in Nami’s school, but eventually the teachers stopped talking about it.

Nami’s description of the lake alludes to an intrinsic absurdity, this time relating to our societal response, or lack thereof, to climate change. Because the heart of the issue, the receding water level itself, is not addressed, the fishermen are forced to extend the pier. Furthermore, it is not the city people, but the vulnerable townspeople who rely on fishing for subsistence that bear the brunt of the lake's ecological degradation. Bellová also appears to draw a parallel between the failed space missions of the past with our current efforts to “establish settlements” on other planets. Recent costly space endeavors with the goal of exploring the possibility of establishing human colonies on Mars to evade climate doom on Earth come to mind.

Whether a historical reflection or a lesson about our climate future, the impact of the story is magnified in the context of today’s circumstances. While reading The Lake, I also couldn’t help but think about Russia’s barbaric ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The transgressions and violence in this book that we associate with the Soviet past are as relevant today as they were back then, albeit by a different name. As such, I did not walk away from the book with a feeling of hope. There is no rosy Hollywood ending. Bellová herself has described Nami as experiencing a kind of Odyssean journey, “very much like Ulysses going out into the world, finding out something about himself and coming home.” But unlike Odysseus, who returns to Ithaca a changed man and a hero, it is unclear what Nami discovers about himself on his journey. No Penelope awaits him in the town by the lake. No peace is restored in his town upon his return. The brutal experiences do not condition Nami into a hero, nor does he become more depraved. Nami returns just as powerless to affect change as when he started.

Perhaps that is precisely Bellová’s intention. Bellová’s gripping depiction of life under forced occupation shows how despite the utter bleakness of their reality, people like Nami can still find ways to keep on going, as did many under communism and so many do now under other oppression. In the face of evil, there is nothing more radical than preserving one's humanity.

Reviewed by Anna West