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The Wooden Village by Peter Pistanek: book review






The Wooden Village: Rivers of Babylon 2 (2008) is set in 1992 in Bratislava, before the ‘Velvet Divorce’ when the Slovaks broke away from the Czechs, and is now the capital of Slovakia. Near Bratislava is the village of Nova Ves – now a suburb of Bratislava. The reference to the wooden village is a collection of wooden huts as living quarters behind the Ambassador-Racz Hotel. It is the second part of a trilogy – the first part, Rivers of Babylon (2007) featured a gangster and hotelier called Racz, and the third novel in the trilogy is The End of Freddy (2009).

There are a motley crew of characters, but the novel revolves around a handful. Racz, the gangster and businessman makes a brief appearance, with his former mistress Silvia Hronska, returning to her liberated homeland from Austria, whom he knew as a dancer in his hotel. Silvia now wants to start a Perverts’ Club.

Martin Junec is an American-Slovak returning to his homeland to explore business opportunities and to find a Slovak wife. Feri and his wife Erzika are toilet cleaners whose fortunes rise and fall with the involvement of Lady, a sex worker. Freddy Piggybank (real name Mestanek), who works in the Ambassador-Racz Hotel car park, loves Sida who works for Silvia. There are drunks and poets and police officers and the Slovak psychic Hruskovic.

Martin Junec was an electrician and saxophone player in his homeland. He had a wife, Mafa, and a son, Oliver. When performing in Norway he sought political asylum and then moved to America to live. He is now a naturopath, astrologer and Artisania Lamps entrepreneur. Divorced from Mafa, he met university professor and anthropologist, Edna Gerschwitz, in America. While he travels to Bratislava, she is working in Papua New Guinea.

The lives of this group are anything but usual or normal – it is a village of exploitation, sex, perversion, poverty, alcoholism, kidnapping, brutality, and unscrupulous business deals. The characters, setting, and plot are not pleasant, and it is not an interesting novel, except the last 20 pages. Surprisingly, the ending is neat, all threads are tied together, the outcomes of each characters’ lives are explained, and everything is rather ‘normal.’ The best sentence in the book is the last one: ‘His days will be as lovely as a field of flax.’



MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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