Marek Hlasko, Killing the Second Dog

When it comes to fiction, there is a curtain, a wall, a rupture between these 2020s and the middle years of the 20th century.

I say this in part for the technological changes, which makes impossible so many of the classic narratives: facial recognition, the genealogical use of DNA, social media, and the rest. Before all that, we saw the beginnings of this disjunction with the telephone, though less absolutely.

But more importantly, we live now without the same horrific prevalence of violence and the unspeakable. There's violence still, and cell phones make the spectacle and hence the viability of violence always present, but more of us live now with the illusion that we're past all that: violence happens elsewhere and to others, rather than being always possible. Violence remains endemic, and some regions are shatteringly full of it, and also sexism and racism and neocolonialism combine to make it less visible only for some of us, but somehow we've newly come to think of violence as not normal.

Or at least that's how I feel after reading Marek Hlasko's gritty 1965 Killing the Second Dog, published just a few years before his death at 35.

The novel is told in the voice of Jacob, a man around Hlasko's age (and Hlask's middle name was Jakub), who with his co-conspirator Robert has found himself dedicated to the craft of serially seducing women for their money. He's a Pole living in Israel, whose nihilistic sense of self grew from his experiences in Warsaw during WW2: seeing rape committed in public, being forced to watch lynchings and street executions; knowing in graphic detail the kinds of tortures that people visited on each other at that time. This nihilism only grew, though, under Communism and its extermination of spontaneous good will among those who could otherwise have been a community.

And yeah, there's a woman to be exploited, and a dog is killed, and there have been other dogs and other women, and Jacob is violent and has violence directed at him and is violent against himself, but none of it matters because nothing matters.

It's a short book, but for me a very tough read: not because of what's on the page, which is relatively tame except in short passages, but because there's a radical nihilism that feels to me would've been incredibly difficult to live with.

Recommended, certainly, for the prose (Hemingway!) and the characters (Beckett!) and the grit (Zola!), but not for everyone.