An Inexplicable Story: The Narrative of Questus Firmus Siculus
By Josef Skvorecky
Translated by Kaca Polackova Henley
Key Porter, 179 pages, $32.95
The search for truth remains an ever-elusive preoccupation for the reader and protagonist alike in Josef Skvorecky's latest tale, An Inexplicable Story. In this slim novel, the veteran Czech émigré writer leaves behind his familiar, literary stomping grounds, venturing instead to ancient Rome during the time of the Emperor Augustus, with a delightful mystery wrapped in an enigma.
Presented in the guise of a non-fiction, scholarly work, complete with preface and commentaries, the novel centres on the English translation of an ancient text, known as the Narratio Questi, or the Narrative of Questus Firmus Siculus. Archeology students discovered the Narratio Questi, which consists of seven damaged scrolls, in an urn in Honduras. Everything surrounding the text is shrouded in mystery: How did it arrive on the American continent? Why was it contained in an urn a few hundred years younger than the text itself? The only certainty, it seems, is the authenticity of the text, which is reinforced time and again by "experts."
In the narrative itself, a young Roman called Questus describes his life as the son of an aristocratic legate for Augustus by the name of Gaius, and of the beautiful Proculeia. Questus waxes poetic about his mother several times, suggesting an unnatural affection for her not unusual in Imperial Rome. But even if Questus suffers from an Oedipus complex, as he himself muses, he's not alone in his devotion. Listed among Proculeia's many admirers is Caecina, a wealthy senator whom she marries after the death of her husband. Around the same time as Gaius's death, Augustus sentences the poet Ovid to relegatio,a mild form of banishment, much to Proculeia's distress, since she is very fond of Ovid. The reasons for her feelings become apparent.
Questus, who like his "uncle" Ovid refuses to follow in the family tradition of studying law, decides to set out in search of the poet after rumours begin circulating that he drowned. After learning of Ovid's whereabouts, Questus later sets out on a more ambitious journey, ending up in the Gulf of Mexico, where Romans were never thought to have landed.
The manuscript itself answers some questions, such as Questus's true paternity and the role his mother played in Ovid's famous work, Amores,but it raises a slew of others, including: Why was Ovid banished and how did the narrator arrive on the American continent?
While the fictional ancient text illustrates Skvorecky's in-depth knowledge of Roman history, the narrative is laborious since it often breaks off mid-sentence for several lines. Understandably, this is Skvorecky's intent: to create a puzzle of a plot, which the reader must solve.
The game becomes more enthralling during the fictional commentary and scholarly letters that follow the Narratio Questi. In it, mystery writer Patrick Oliver Enfield assumes the role of detective, and deduces an intricate tale of adultery to explain the reason for Ovid's banishment and his subsequent recreation as a comedic playwright. The fictional writer also surmises, through clues in the Questus text, that the narrator was the creator of the first steamship, which carried him to the American continent.
From this point, the tale turns out to be a literary mind game played with the reader, with truth and fiction engaged in a never-ending somersault. It seems this previously unknown text recurs throughout literary history, first in the farce, A Flea in Her Ear,by French playwright Georges Feydeau, then in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,and in Jules Verne's The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields,where "truth" eventually meets fiction head-on.
As Skvorecky explains in the author's note, he read both Poe and Verne as a young lad. After being exiled himself from his homeland, he and a friend dreamed of journeying to the Kerguelen Islands mentioned in Poe's work, but poor health prevented him. His appreciation of Poe, along with his fascination for Roman technology and the mystery of Ovid's exile, brewed in his mind for years until he sat down to pen this tale.
"There are confoundedly many things between heaven and earth," Enfield says, paraphrasing Hamlet, of the Questus narrative. Thanks to Skvorecky's imagination, confounding things are fertile fodder for this gripping literary puzzle. Leah Eichler is a Toronto-based writer currently working on a novel.
Leah Eichler