reviewed by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
Toronto's Women's News Oct. 2002. Vol. 4 No. 9

Prolific author Josef Skvorecky's latest novel, An Inexplicable Story, is a confounding literary mystery told in cryptic fragments and fictional academic letters. Patient readers willing to wade through the initial meandering obfuscation are rewarded as the book culminates in a series of fascinating interconnected ideas.

An Inexplicable Story is framed as a text within a text. Professor Patrick Oliver Enfield translates and publishes a recently discovered, albeit badly damaged historical manuscript from the first century A.D. The text that follows is a personal account by Roman Questus Firmus Siculus, and the narrative is so fragmented that readers must piece together the gist of Questus's story as if they themselves are literary historians.

Essentially, Questus is a young, adventurous Roman whose family is connected with the poet Ovid. He spends time in the army, jokes with friends and admires his mother in Oedipal regard. Importantly, Questus is a reader, and while he at first reads Ovid's writing for mere scintillation, he soon begins to make discoveries that lead him into political intrigue and sexual scandal.

Professor Enfield's post narrative commentary provides welcome insight into Questus's identity and story. The letters from spirited historians and academics that follow raise intriguing questions about the text's authenticity and in doing so project layers of ideas, context and meaning onto the narrative.

Although serious in tone, there's a sense of play throughout the novel. The author puts a series of puzzle pieces in front of us and then helps us to assemble them at the very end to see something that's really quite remarkable. The problem is in the process of actually getting to the end. In one of his previous works, An Engineer of Human Souls, Skvorecky writes, "There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone, without exception, has weaknesses."

Although the second part of this novel is certainly a poignant read, instead of captivating the reader with interest-piquing threads of the mystery from the start, the section of the novel that forms the Questus narrative is largely inaccessible. The fragment device is so disconnected and scattered, so riddled with historical detail and factual data that at times it simply fails to engage. Fragments stop mid-sentence, continuity is rough and characters drop in and out with little development. Professor Enfield's explanatory footnotes merely provide endless historical detail, failing to elucidate in any meaningful way. Segments that do begin to let us see into very human aspects of the characters' lives end abruptly and subsequent sections invariably spin the reader off into something else entirely.

In the end, An Inexplicable Story is about the historical continuity of literary themes, the interconnectivity of ideas, questions of truth and authenticity, and the quest for knowledge. Ironically, Skvorecky's academic characters and the exceptionally well-crafted post narrative discussion seem to suggest that sometimes the stories and dialogue around a text can be just as interesting, if not more so, than the text itself.