Back when I was still relatively new to blogging, I used to sign up for reading challenges, partly for the fun of reading in a group setting but mostly for the joy of making ambitious reading lists. My favourite among those challenges was the Eastern European Reading Challenge and each year that I did it I put together obscenely detailed reading lists (in 2011 and 2012). One book that made it on to the list both years was How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel – which is really just a rambling way of telling you that I’ve been looking forward to reading it for a long, long time.
Pavel was a Czech sports journalist who was diagnosed as bipolar in his mid-thirties (after he set an Austrian barn on fire while in Innsbruck covering the Olympics). He spent much of the rest of his short life (he died of at heart attack at age 42) going in and out of hospitals but also writing. And the best of what he wrote was this gentle, meditative, and comforting memoir of his childhood, first published in 1974.
Pavel grew up just outside of Prague in the town of Buštěhrad, the third son of a Gentile mother and a Jewish father. His mother is a steady presence in his life but it is his father whom Pavel focuses on here – most specifically his love of fishing which he passed down to his youngest son:
Business and fishing were his two great passions. He excelled unbelievably at both, preferred fishing, and considered it a disaster if he could not combine a sales trip for the Swedish firm of Elektrolux – for which he sold refrigerators and vacuum cleaners – with a fishing adventure.
Pavel was only eight years old when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and still a little boy when, a few years later, his two elder brother and his father were sent away to concentration camps. Before he leaves, his father tries to teach his young son all the secrets to catching his beloved carp. They are lessons Pavel needs to remember as the war continues on, as his mother returns home exhausted each day from forced labour, as food supplies run out:
At that time we needed delicious fat carp meat. We had so little to eat and nothing much to barter. We could trade carp for flour, bread and Mama’s cigarettes. Mama and I lived alone at that time, for the rest of the family was in a concentration camp. It was up to me to catch the carp, but it took me some time getting to know them. I had to learn to tell the difference between their good and bad moods; I had to learn how to tell when they were hungry, when they were full, and when they felt like playing. I had to recognize where they were likely to swim, and where I would look for them in vain.
Pavel doesn’t dwell on the tragedies of war and his family was luckier than most. When he is caught stealing fish from local German-controlled ponds it is by a sympathetic gamekeeper. His father and brothers all return home from their concentration camps. And he and his mother survive the lean times. But the horror of war is certainly there: Buštěhrad is only a few kilometers away from Lidice, the town the German’s chose to massacre in reprisal for the assassination of Himmler in 1942, and Pavel knew people there.
Mostly though, this is a memoir of wonder and childhood. Of learning how to fish, of admiring the great fishermen in young Pavel’s life, and of finding one good thing to hold on to when everything else is turned upside down. When the war ends, the family has earned its peace and his father chooses to spend it as he has always spent his leisure time – fishing:
Down at the river he slept most of the time, just as many fishermen do. The water hums, the small waves roll as the clouds float by, and the wife is miles away. The rods are set so that the fish can almost catch themselves. Of all the sleep a man can have, the fisherman’s sleep is the sweetest. It is the greatest of luxuries – sleep and fishing.
I really enjoyed this short, touching book but the one thing that drove me a little crazy about this edition was the complete absence of accents on the Czech words (for example, Pavel’s home of Buštěhrad becomes Bustehrad). I know this is the lazy way of anglicizing place names but it is distracting and a little odd since the introduction to the book does retain the correct accents. And since the book is part of Penguin’s Central European Classics series it seems even odder to be so dismissive of the accents. However, it is a good translation and readily available so, in the grand scheme of things, I can overlook a few missing accents.
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This lovely book sits unread on my shelf. It is taking me awhile to get to it also . Your review makes me want to move it up the list a bit. Lovely story. Interesting Penguin didn’t do the accents.
Once I did get to it, it went quickly! It’s a very short book and simply written, which makes for a very fast but enjoyable read. When you do get a chance to read it I look forward to hearing what you think.
I thought of taking a couple of those books from the series with me overseas but I like to take books I can leave behind so probably won’t. Will take something fluffy instead.