[REVIEW] Josef Skvorecky, An Inexplicable Story

[rfmcdonald]

That Czechoslovak-Canadian writer Josef Skvorecky's 2002 novel An Inexplicable Story can best be described as a pastiche should not be taken as a slur on the book. Rather, it should be taken as great praise. I can't think offhand of any other writer who could so effectively meld such disparate topics as the reasons for Ovid's exile to Tomid and his fate there, the abortive scientific revolution of the early Roman Empire, Mesoamerican state formation Nazi German submarines' exploits in the Kerguelens, Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Jules Verne's 1897 Le Sphinx des glaces. Suffice it to say that, in An Inexplicable Story, Skvorecky managed to entirely rehabilitate the tro0pe of the ancient hidden manuscript for the post-modern (or, perhaps rather, late modern) reader, disassociated fragments fused by scholarly conjecture in the context of a remarkably oddly globalized world. Ah, Tesalus.