The Hideout

by Egon Hostovský

Pushkin Press, £12

Review by Malcolm Forbes

A CZECH engineer leaves Prague for Paris in 1939, but when the Nazis invade his homeland there is no going back. What should have been a short stay is instead a one-way, dead-end trip. As German forces proceed to overrun France, the man flees and is driven, quite literally, underground. In a dank cellar, he evaluates a life lived and squandered, while also weighing up a possible chance of redemption through one final heroic act.

The Hideout is a short but powerful novel. First published in 1945 and translated by Fern Long, it masterfully evokes and distils the fear, uncertainty and desperation that plagued occupied Europe – particularly those who were either on the run or with nowhere left to hide.

Its author was also a fugitive, albeit one who made it to safety and started anew. Egon Hostovský (1908-73) got out of his native Czechoslovakia as the Nazis were closing in and eventually settled in New York. There he worked for Radio Free Europe and his exiled country’s consulate. Like his cousin, Stefan Zweig, he also wrote. His books were banned in communist Czechoslovakia but acclaimed in America. Today Hostovský is regarded as a major 20th-century Czech author.

For many, though, he remains unknown. The Hideout makes for a perfect entry-point to his work. The book takes the form of a long letter – or “little notebook” – in which an absent husband explains his past disappearance and current predicament to his wife, his “dearest Hanichka”. “I shall no longer be living at the moment you read these lines,” he announces at the outset. Our interest piqued, we plunge in and read on.

As Hostovský’s nameless engineer sifts memories and shares recollections of a holiday in 1938 and a dinner party in 1939, his explanation becomes more a confession. Bored of family life and feeling claustrophobic in Prague, that “windowless refuge”, he reveals that he escaped to Paris to declare his love to the beguiling Madame Olga. He was rejected by her – she was “a phantom which had to dissolve at the first touch” – but was soon wanted by the Germans. Fortunately, a French doctor whisked him to Normandy and gave him sanctuary in his cellar. Here, for the last two years, he has been enduring “voluntary imprisonment”.

The narrator attempts to wait out the war in semi-solitary confinement, but as he draws the reader deeper into his account, there are asides on madness and unhappiness, delirious thoughts and surreal dreams, and a further declaration of guilt, this time concerning murder. Gradually, and subtly, Hostovský makes it clear that his beleaguered protagonist is going nowhere fast.

The Hideout belongs to a specific Czech tradition, comprising more the existential struggles and strangeness of Kundera and Kafka than the ribald high jinks and skewed wisdom of Hrabal and Hašek. Whether charting transient freedom in Paris, “city of light rustlings, of sweetly secret speech, of blue grayness”, or chronicling inner turmoil, this overlooked classic is both beautiful and intense.