Exploring the Silences:
Guarding Hanna by Miha Mazzini (trans. M. Viseenjak-Limon & Mark White)
Slovenian author Miha Mazzini’s novel Guarding Hanna, just published in English by Scala House Press, is a strange little piece of work. The plot is spare: a misfit mob enforcer is assigned to protect an important witness until she can testify at the trial of a rival kingpin the following week. The enforcer, who narrates the story, has a physical deformity that gives him an alarming appearance. He and the rest of humanity regard each other from a safe distance, and in his isolation, he has developed a fairly sophisticated philosophy of life to justify his misanthropy. Now, forced into prolonged contact with another human being, he must deal with the daily stresses and interactions that he has largely managed to avoid.
Aside from a few pages of setup and a brisk conclusion, most of Guarding Hanna takes place inside Hanna’s modest one-bedroom flat in Berlin. The narrative is rigorously chronological. Time is carved up into incidents that transpire during the course of seven days in which not much happens – a sort of anatomy lesson in the boredom of modern life. The static quality quickly becomes oddly compelling: the closest analogy I can think of is the 1984 Jim Jarmusch film Stranger Than Paradise. Hanna accepts her situation with equanimity, making numerous (mostly futile) attempts to engage her taciturn bodyguard in conversation, chatting away about the various unexceptional details of her life when she’s not sleeping, eating or watching television.
The bodyguard’s frantic efforts to avoid the discomfort of routine human engagement with Hanna manifest in a series of increasingly debilitating (and funny) physical symptoms. By the fifth day, he’s struggling with insomnia, constipation (after a noisy bout of diarrhea and gas), wheezing, coughing, watering eyes and the inability to relieve himself through his usual routine of masturbation. He reports this all in a wonderfully dry, detached voice as the minutes tick slowly by toward the day when his assignment ends. Mazzini manipulates the pace of the story so deftly that when the action picks up in the final 30 pages, I found myself having to re-read paragraphs to make sure I didn’t miss any important details amid the frenzy.
Guarding Hanna is deceptively complex and ambitious. The voice of the bodyguard enables Mazzini to offer a number of provocative observations about contemporary urban life in a natural and unpretentious way, weaving them into the organic pace of the story. While certain aspects of the conclusion seem contrived, Mazzini doesn’t offer a pat resolution to the questions he raises about alienation and the value of human relationships. Funny, readable, realistic and profound, Guarding Hanna offers a rewarding reading experience from an unlikely corner of the world. Hopefully it will bring Miha Mazzini the wider audience his talent and vision deserve.
9:33:31 AM 
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