Authors
Michal AJVAZ
Poet, fiction writer, and essayist Michal Ajvaz was born in Prague on 30 October 1949. In 1967–74 he read Czech and aesthetics at Prague University. He did various menial jobs including work as a janitor, a night-watchman in a garage and a pump attendant for the Prague Waterworks. Since 1994 he has worked freelance. He lives in Prague.
The fantastical poetry – Vražda v hotelu Intercontinental (Murder in the Hotel Intercontinental) – and prose fiction of Michal Ajvaz are thematically akin to the literary work of two of his contemporaries, Jiří Kratochvil and Daniela Hodrová. All three authors infuse their work with contemporary urban realities that capture the essence of the distinctive settings (Prague for Hodrová and Ajvaz and Brno for Kratochvil) together with supernatural phenomena. Ajvaz’s fiction grafts on ideas from the mystical, Prague-based novels of Gustav Meyrink and the magic realism of Borges; an additional facet of adventure literature links it to the genre of urban fantasy (like that of writers such as Neil Gaiman in Great Britain), which does not exist as a genre in the Czech Republic. In the collection of short stories Návrat starého varana (Return of the Old Komodo Dragon), strange and exotic beasts and aquatic creatures nonchalantly roam Prague, leaving everyone but the narrator undisturbed. In the story ‘U Pavouka’ (At the Sign of the Spider) the people in the pub sit back with an ostentatious lack of concern, as the narrator ferociously battles a giant lizard. The absurdity of the situation culminates in the waiter’s bothersome attempts to get the narrator to pay his bill. The symbolic title of his first novel, Druhé město (The Other City), points to the connotative level of Ajvaz’s fiction: the search for, and finding of, another world – not a tangible subterranean or other-wordly kingdom, but a world beyond the borders of human reason or our sensory perception. It is a world free of our accepted sign systems. It is no accident that the gateway to this other city is a script, a book or a library: in ‘The Other City’, the initial signal of another world is a book using a different alphabet; one enters it among the shelves of a university library. In ‘The White Ants’ novella from the collection Tyrkysový orel (Turquoise Eagle), the alphabet comprises flavoured letters made of seashells. This tendency continues in Zlatý věk (The Golden Age), with a single difference: there is no longer any need to look for the other world; it exists on a nameless island in the Atlantic Ocean. The description of the island takes up more than half of the work, together with an account of the single, local Book, which circulates among the islanders and can be changed by anybody at will. The air of mystery surrounding the Book, together with its amorphous form, renders it illegible, yet in the latter half the narrator sheds some light on one of its many stories. The narrator himself is stylized as a person walking about Prague, who notes down what he has seen or been told. Throughout his fiction, Ajvaz repeatedly creates compartmentalized structures; in effect the narrative is multi-layered and mediated by someone: the storylines are embedded in each other while the separate planes break through and permeate one another (‘Zeno’s Paradoxes’ a novella from Tyrkysový orel offers the most such layers). The humour of Ajvaz’s writing stems from an associative bond between entirely incongruous phenomena. It is as much an effect of juxtaposing trivial life situations with relevant philosophical problems. The inspiration of phenomenology is great: to comprehend the other world one must employ the Husserlian ‘bracketing of the existence’ of our own world. This accounts for the apparent descriptiveness of the author’s style, since his extensive use of determination and his attention to detail point to the ambiguous appearance of things. He challenges our customary interpretation and allows things to show themselves as they really are. Michal Ajvaz introduces the theoretical basis of his fiction in the volumes Znak a bytí (Sign and Being) and Tajemství knihy (The Mystery of the Book).
(eg)
This author profile was last updated in 2008.
Deutsch 
Michal AJVAZ
En français Michal AJVAZ
