#RivetingReviews: Ursula Phillips reviews THE BONNET by Katarína Kucbelová
The Bonnet is the first prose work by the award-winning Slovak poet Katarína Kucbelová.
Described in the publisher’s blurb as ‘literary reportage’, its poetic and psychological dimensions make it feel more like a loosely structured novel. Consisting of eighty-seven short vignettes and an epilogue, the narrative reaches out in several directions: the visits over two years of the first-person narrator to the remote Slovak village of Šumiac in the Upper Hron valley of the Lower Tatras, to learn from an octogenarian woman the dying art of bonnet-making; this woman’s perspective on the social realities of both the present and the past; and the narrator’s quest for lost aspects of her own identity, explored through her grandmother’s memories. The experiences of women in rural Slovakia over the course of nearly a century, including forced marriages, physical hardship and suffering, and lack of access to formal education, are viewed through distinctly feminist eyes and are set against the backdrop of continuous political upheaval, including communism, the revolution of 1989 and present-day fascism.
Of course, the book also explores bonnet-making. Before 1945 most married women wore bonnets and knew how to construct and embroider their own, using bonnet designs unique to each village. Recent versions are not made from the materials one might expect in rural communities, such as linen and wool, but from any cheap stuff that is available, such as artificial tulle, nylon and polyester. The colours of the fabrics, embroidery threads, trimmings, lace, ribbons can be ‘garish and tawdry’; and ordinary cardboard is inserted to provide firmness to the back. The narrator is not after beauty but authenticity in her bonnet, not just because she wants to learn a technique ‘that will soon be extinct’, but because she’s curious to see what this confrontation with the unknown might provoke in herself:
‘It’s about letting something alien into my life. Anything. And hoping it will stir something up. […] I want to find out what it feels like to be a woman who keeps her head covered and what it’s like to live this kind of life.’
What she learns about life in a remote village, in the past and now, and about the personal and ethnic interrelationships between people, eventually takes precedence over her attempts to complete a bonnet.
The exploitation of local traditions by politicians and cultural nostalgists is treated with derision. This is not a book for historians of folklore. On the contrary, the narrator, a long-time resident of Bratislava – a townie, though born close to the region in Banská Bystrica – foregrounds the ubiquitous commercialisation of folksy costumes, motifs and architecture. Why, for instance, do kindergartens, bus stops, restaurants, pizzerias, cafés and hairdressers have to resemble traditional log cabins? She wants instead to ‘experience the real thing hands on: I don’t want a folkloristic case for my mobile’.
The prejudices that persist in contemporary society towards Roma people – marginalised economically and housed in squalid settlements at the edge of villages – are a central concern from the outset of the book. A hopeful note is sounded at the end, however, when a local woman who has been advocating for their welfare is elected mayor. Interestingly, they are not the only ‘different’ element in the ethnic mix; others are just as deep-rooted but seem better integrated. We learn that Šumiac is the ‘westernmost Ruthenian village’; grandmother’s dialect contained German elements; and Hungarians and Romanians also played a role in the region’s history.
This is a sensitive, elegantly translated and sometimes humorous story, which does much to make visible a remote, forgotten corner of Eastern Europe.
Reviewed by Ursula Phillips
THE BONNET
Written by Katarína Kucbelová
Translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood
Published by Seagull Books (2024)
September 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Ursula Phillips is a British translator from Polish and a writer on Polish literary history. Recent translations include novels by Zofia Nałkowska, Choucas (1927) and Boundary (1935), which received the Found in Translation Award 2015 and the PIASA (Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America) Wacław Lednicki Award 2017 respectively.
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