Authors

A graduate of the Film and Television Faculty, Tereza Brdečková is a professional journalist and screenwriter but has tried her hand at literary fiction as well. In addition to micro fiction, short stories, and novellas (Sobecký itinerář [A Selfish Itinerary], Listy Markétě [Letters to Markéta]), a “film” novel about the Surrealist painter Toyen, she is the author of three works of prose that have been called novels. In the first, Šahrazád a král (Scheherazade and the King, 2000), she creates a strange blend by weaving the colorful, debauched world of the Orient found in the cycle of tales told by Princess Scheherazade with the stories of ordinary people from Bohemia and abroad. These two worlds intersect in chance encounters between individual destinies. Forming the novel’s general contours are the stories of members of three generations of one family over the second half of the 20th century: Grandfather František and his wife Nina, mother Helena, and daughter Sylva. The family relationships are spread out over different time periods that are mingled in non-chronological order. The result is a mosaic recalling the patterns on the exotic scarfs the author uses as a unifying motif running through the novel, and other bits of the oriental create a counterpart to the banality in which her characters live. Important for her are emotional attachments that remain so bottled up inside their external manifestation is largely muted. The first half of the novel explores relationships between men and women in short chapters bearing the names of the mosaic’s characters. The second half is focused on Sylva and her partner (her mother’s former lover), a dissident philosopher and later politician, an intellectual who is permanently searching for the meaning of his life and his actions. He adumbrates by and large the heroes of her subsequent two novels. In Šahrazád a král, she seems to be testing her ability to write fiction for the first time and looking for the characters that could become the bearers of future stories. She published her second novel, Učitel dějepisu (The History Teacher), four years later. The protagonist is again an educated man. He is a professional historian whose job it is to impart to students knowledge of the nation’s history. He maintains a critical distance from the present and detachment from its ephemera of interests and ambitions. The recent past under communist oppression has left him with psychological scars, while the coming of freedom has revived his desire to awaken in his students their ability to think independently. He tries to achieve this through his interpretation of history, and in so doing he deviates from the given curriculum. One of the novel’s key scenes is when the protagonist has a confrontation with a school inspector, a careerist and former henchman for the fallen regime. Against the inspector’s demands for objectivity the teacher defends his right to voice his own opinion. His abnormally strong feeling of civic responsibility and the shame he harbors toward his past life eventually lands him in a mental hospital. When he gets out, disillusioned about post-revolution society, he emigrates to the USA to be with his father. But feeling out of place with the mode of life there, he returns. The teacher’s story does not end, however, with resignation, but with his internal exile. He finds a way to reconcile himself with reality through the magic power of an esoteric symbolic word that is able to return the life force to people (at the conclusion a painting that accidentally comes into his possession becomes its vehicle). He represents the type of passive anti-hero who builds his intimate world as a defense against the ugliness of reality. The author has woven into the background of the novel a web of chance relations that form life’s hidden hotbed. The protagonist of Brdečková’s third novel, Slepé mapy (Blind Maps), is once again an intellectual and aesthete, this time an interior designer. Yet she has chosen a much more distinctive plot than in her previous books. The main character lives an orderly life as a small-town celebrity (he bears a faint resemblance to the heroes of Zdeňek Zapletal’s fiction from the 1980s) and is accused of sexually abusing a young boy, a refugee from the Balkans. He confesses to it even though no one, not even the police, thinks him capable of committing such an act. Only later is it revealed that he has been undergoing a crisis that has led to an intense (sadomasochistic) love affair and later to the inexplicable need to confess to a crime he did not commit. The whole novel is built on the revelation of his inexplicable compulsions. The second major character is a woman who is the guardian of the refugee, the boy who has carried the image of rape in his mind from his childhood amidst the Balakan wars. She has also experienced a trauma that has weighed heavy on her conscience for a long time (she was not able to prevent one child from killing another while they were in her care). This led her to devote her life to fighting against images of violence. The author additionally introduces several other characters and relationships (such as the protagonist’s with his mother). Compared to her earlier work, Brdečková here mixes dream images and the imaginings of her characters with the fictional reality to create uncertainty in the reader. The center of attention, however, is not the character’s psychological makeup (this is subordinate to the author’s will) but the intricate weaving of time and events, which creates an impression of random occurrence. Evident are elements of Kafka’s symbolism and particularly Robbe-Grillet’s objectifying neutrality vis-à-vis the characters and the novel’s world. Brdečková’s most recent work of fiction, it can thus be taken as her pertinacious search for a modern novelistic form, and readers can hope that this is a pursuit she will continue.

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E brdeckova@yahoo.com

Agency (foreign rights)

Pluh, www.pluh.org