Authors
Ivan BINAR
The novelist Ivan Binar was born in Boskovice on 25 June 1942. He took a degree in Czech, history, and art education at the Institute of Education, Ostrava. His career included teaching at a primary school, working as Editor-in-Chief of the youth magazine Tramp, as well as being a deliveryman and a power-plant mechanic. Binar immigrated to Austria in 1977 and worked for Radio Free Europe from 1983 until 2002. Then he was Chairman of the Czech Writers’ Union (2002-2004). He lives in Prague.
The essence of all Binar’s major works is shaped by both the 1960s, when he published his first book, a piece of fiction for children titled Knížka o tom, jak pan Bouda s cirkusem se světem loudá (A Little Book about How Mr Bouda and his Circus Wandered the World), and the first half of the 70s, when he spent a year in prison for sedition. Kytovna umění (The Putty Shop of Art), a work of fiction shaped by the author’s reflections on the earliest phase of his life as an émigré in Austria, raising questions of art and the artist in relation to society, while featuring compelling sequences from the author’s childhood and youth in retrospective passages. Likewise, Rekonstrukce (Reconstruction), a work of prose fiction written in the late 70s, is primarily a documentary flashback, including a contemporary conception of the problem of crime and punishment, in which the true villains and culprits are the informer and the social system, whereas the autobiographical ‘criminal’ is understood mainly as the victim or product of the modern era. Such persons find themselves in these roles simply for having stubbornly stood up for their dreams of a more advanced, yet more humane organization of public affairs. The grotesque novel Sedm kapitol ze života Václava Netušila aneb S kolem kolem světa (Seven Chapters from the Life of Václav Netušil or, Around the World with a Bicycle) could well be considered a provisional artistic synthesis of Binar’s literary work to date. Despite the diversity of its genre structure, the book has many characteristics of a documentary about a generation. In addition, the writer raises topical questions of several alternative moral codes or a number of the parallel worlds in which Czech society lived as a kind of province of the Soviet Union before 1989 and also, to a certain extent, transferred these traumas and moral dilemmas into exile. Whereas Binar seems to explain the existence of such diverse worlds in both our perception and our dreams as a reaction to ‘closed’ society here, in his treatment these traditional bad habits appear ineradicable, unbeatable, as if one could at best only hope not to be defeated by them. Binar suggests that ultimately it is our own lives we know the least about – such is the inference of his pivotal novel, which, regardless of the imaginary nature of its scenes, constitutes a traumatic retrospective. It is also unconscious evidence that the theme of crime and punishment is still too relevant to allow hasty judgements. In the 1990s, apart from his autobiographical prose, Binar was able to publish S kouzelníkem kolem světa (Around the World with a Magician), another of his books for young readers, as well as a miniature horror story called Jeníkova práce (Jeník’s Job).
(vn)
This profile was updated in 2005
Deutsch 
Ivan BINAR, Deutsch.doc
En français Ivan BINAR, En français.doc
