Seeing People Off
SynopsisPlot
There is a liveliness and effervescence to Jana Benová’s prose that is magnetic. Whether addressing the loneliness of relationships or the effectiveness of rat poison, her voice and observations call to mind the verve and sophistication of Renata Adler or Jenny Offill, while remaining utterly singular. Seeing People Off follows Elza and Ian, a young couple living in a humongous apartment complex outside Bratislava where the walls play music and talk, and time is immaterial. Drawing on her memories, everyday interactions, observations of post-socialist realities, and Elza’s attraction to actor, Kalisto Tanzi, Seeing People Off is a kaleidoscopic, poetic, and deeply funny portrait of a relationship.
Story
About this book
Seeing People Off follows Elza and Ian, a young couple living in a huge apartment complex on the outskirts of Bratislava, where the walls play music and talk and time refuses to move in a straight line. Jana Benová builds the book from fragments: memories, small daily encounters, observations of post-socialist life, and Elza's attraction to an actor named Kalisto Tanzi. The result is closer to a mosaic of episodes than a conventional plot.
Benová moves between humor and loneliness, between domestic detail and larger questions about how people stay close or drift apart. The setting grounds the novel in a recognizable Slovak reality, the concrete housing estates that ring many Central European cities, while the prose turns stranger and more playful. Comparisons have been drawn to Renata Adler and Jenny Offill, though the sensibility stays her own.
The novel won the European Union Prize for Literature, an award given to emerging writers across Europe. Written in Slovak, it later appeared in English translation, carrying Benová's compressed, associative sentences to readers outside the region where such apartment blocks and street corners are ordinary sights.
