Authors

In Daleko od stromu (Chip off the Old Block), her first novel to be published by a sanctioned publisher, Brabcová depicts the existential trauma of a vulnerable adolescent girl who in the face of mounting psychological uncertainties and anxiety tries to understand her own generation and define what makes it different from that of her parents’. In a fictionalized testimony, the author constructs a parable of the modern world, which is infused as much with the tones of ancient legends resonating with mythological meanings, as with the basic facts of everyday life in Czechoslovak society in the early 1980s. It was mainly in contrast to the conceptual limits of most works from the sanctioned publishing houses during that era, that Brabcová became synonymous with the independent Czech literature that was then on the rise. She was among the first to receive the Jiří Orten Prize for young writers publishing in samizdat. In Zlodějina (Thieving History), Brabcová develops motifs and storylines from her literary debut, now placing greater emphasis on stream of consciousness, often in a creative dialogue with the inspiring techniques that once characterized the nouveau roman. Although the political ‘Absurdistan’, which Czechoslovakia was sometimes nicknamed, may have been a thing of the past after November 1989, she sets her story against the backdrop of a ludicrous, disjointed, absurdly mediocre world. This is as true of the story of a ‘rare specimen of fatso’, who after many trials and tribulations finally goes insane, as it is of the tale of an ordinary saleswoman trapped inside the lift of her prefab-concrete apartment block who suddenly observes her own situation as if she herself is removed from it all. In each of these situations, modern civilization is put before a shattered mirror consisting of a steady stream of consciousness. It seems as if one could endlessly follow this stream with no hint of a plot line ever appearing. What finally arises, however, is a remarkable verbal and sensual cosmogony of humanity as it appears today and of its ever bizarre, obscure thinking. The structure of the novel is based mainly on the stylistic finesses of the text and the admirable flights of the author’s imagination. Brabcová herself has claimed that to those readers who have sympathy for her book the ‘miracle of transubstantiation will be revealed: the uniqueness of each human life, which, amidst the chaos of our times, resists becoming reduced to banality and mediocrity, and stubbornly breaks through to the foundation stones of humanity’. With Brabcová’s third work, Rok perel (Year of Pearls), the critics ultimately focused only on its being the first Czech novel to consider the ‘trendy’ issue of lesbian love. Nonetheless, the author is primarily concerned here with discovering, or recovering, the psychological integrity and identity of her characters, rather than with the amorous trials and tribulations arising from one’s becoming aware of a change in one’s sexual orientation or simply being aware of it. Faced with an increasingly globalized society and its insistence on superficiality, the main characters of her novel, some of them autobiographical, live through a traumatic experience, a sense of utter failure in life, and the increasingly catastrophic loss of their own sense of purpose. The feeling of depression caused by warped, unnatural communication between people today, or by the absence of any communication at all, has become one of the major topics of Brabcová’s fiction.

(vn)

The profile was updated in 2008

Deutsch Zuzana BRABCOVÁ, Deutsch.doc

En français Zuzana BRABCOVÁ, En français.doc