Jimmie is the
young narrator of Vencil -- a novel by local author Frank Shima. Against the rural background of mid-20th century
southeast Minnesota, Jimmie's favorite Uncle Vencil disappears, and Jimmie
leads his family on a picaresque journey to find him.
Here are a few
things I had never thought about before reading Vencil:
• It's not just
Scandinavians who immigrated to Minnesota -- there were enough Czechs who
settled an area south of the Twin Cities to name the local town "New
Prague."
• As recently as
the mid-1950's, it was not uncommon for Czech families to live on farms in the
New Prague vicinity without indoor plumbing or electricity (let alone TV).
• Some of them were
recent-enough immigrants at that time that they spoke only Czech (including
Uncle Vencil).
• A young boy
born on such a farm could arrive at the age of six never having seen an
African-American and believing New Prague to be the "big city."
Jimmie is just such a six-year-old farm boy. Through his eyes, we are not only exposed to this Czech subculture, but we experience his wonderment as he starts school, sees his first indoor toilet, learns of the advent of a mysterious force called television and travels to Minneapolis and St. Paul -- a metropolitan environment that dwarfs New Prague.
Mr. Shima has a
delightful ability to put us into the head of a six-year-old boy seeing for the
first time many aspects of the world that are otherwise familiar to us and even
banal. In addition, he had me completely
caught up in the suspense of learning
what had happened to Uncle Vencil. I looked for whatever opportunities I could
to get back to this slim novel until the mystery was unraveled.
Note: The first chapter of Vencil,
entitled "Superfarmer," won the 1987 Lake Superior Writer Series
Competition for Fiction. The whole book
was published in 2005. Mr. Shima is
currently working on a sequel.
WANT TO BUY A COPY?
Signed copies available on Amazon.com by Seller Riverdog11:
Or, you can email frank@novelgems.com.
