Authors

He grew up in Most in North Bohemia, the atmosphere of which permeates his first collection of short stories Hlava Upanišády (The Head Of The Upanishad) and his novel Jsem město (I, City) which won the Jiří Orten Prize in 1999. In 2000 he was awarded a UNESCO grant and he spent two months living in France where he wrote the novel Sloni mlčí (The Elephants Are Silent). As well as short stories and novels he also writes poetry and wordplay, which he compiled into the slim novel Láska na konci světa (Love At The End Of The World) with the collaboration of the artist Filip Raif. His short stories appear in an American anthology of contemporary Czech literature, Daylight In Night-club Inferno (1997); Twisted Spoon Press publishers brought out an English translation of his book Jsem město under the title I, City. He also writes stories for children which have been broadcast on the Prague Czech Radio programmes Tu rádio and Rádio na polštář. In 2005-2006 Prague Czech Radio also presented the author’s own show, Kouzelný svět Pavla Pavla neboli matematicky Pavla na druhou (The Magical World of Pavel Pavel). His debut children’s work was the book Kouzelný svět Gabriely (The Magical World Of Gabriela) with illustrations by Šárka Zíková (2006), nominated for the 2007 Magnesia Litera Prize. In 2008 Czech TV presented the thirteen-part animated series Dětský zvěřinec (A Child’s Menagerie) based on his theme and script. The book of Dětský zvěřinec was published by Albatros in the same year. He has also written lyrics for the band Zdarr, made up of two former members of the band Laura a její tygři. A CD with 11 of Zdarr’s songs as well as a booklet in the form of a slim volume of poetry was released in 2008 under the title Pavel. His book Patriarchátu dávno zašlá sláva (The Long Lost Glory of the Patriarchy) won the 2004 State Prize for Literature. He was awarded a special prize in 2005 for his comedy-drama short stories with songs Neberte nám ptáka Loskutáka (Don’t Take Away Our Bird Loskuták) at the Prix de Bohemia festival in Poděbrady. He lives in Jablonec nad Nisou.

Writer, poet, occasional lyricist, author of children’s books and of seven noteworthy short-story collections and novels, Pavel Brycz is the classic example of a contemporary writer who uses a confessional and autobiographical approach, full of personal experiences, to successfully establish a dialogue with the wider public, with his writing  frequently displaying the magic and bizarreness of Bohumil Hrabal or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

At first sight he might appear to be just a collector and recorder of stories, or an ingenious constructor of complex arabesques and embellishments, which emerge from everyday events and occasionally take on the dimension of something less probable or even unreal. Brycz is a well-read and thoroughly educated writer, and so it is not difficult for him to enrich the sometimes plain and simple story lines of his short stories and “fragmented” novels through the use of huge digressions. These sometimes convey the impression of circumlocution and aimlessness, not leading to any deeper meditation, but rather echoing the world of Hrabal, Fuks or Páral, never going beyond the horizon of the external world into the spaces of the distant interior.
Pavel Brycz realises that the somewhat sterile literature of today can be revived by one means only, by becoming amusingly eccentric, using a pronounced Rabelaisian style of narrative without any complex metaphors or vertical points of departure. That is why it is impossible to unconditionally agree with some critics who place him in the same camp as the Latin American magical realists. Even with his most significant work, Patriarchátu dávno zašlá sláva, it is impossible to compare it with the sweeping epics of writers such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Stephan Zweig or Robert Musil. It is also difficult to compare Brycz with Czech authors in the tradition of Vladislav Vančura or Karel Čapek, or with the half-forgotten epic writer Vladimír Neff, because Brycz’s poetics are not as “comprehensive”, realistic, detailed or constant in time; instead they trace great historical episodes and fates.

Brycz’s storytelling and fantasizing are bizarre. His literary approach is similar to the poetics of film – sometimes cutting brutally and discarding the preconceptions of time and causality. His writing is also similar to film in its speed and dynamism, the effectiveness of images which, in the majority of cases, can be captured on the screen for only an instant. In a review of the novel Patriarchátu dávno zašlá sláva, the journalist Jiří Peňás writes of a kind of “novelistic skating over the 20^th century”, and he emphasises a simplification and superficiality which the author was unable to avoid in the biographical and autobiographical work on the descendants of the almost mythical Ukrainian Jefim Berezinka. The echo of a kind of timeless, philosophical parable that manliness, heroism and the predominance of patriarchal relations are the principal determinants in the world had already ceased to be the case as the 20^th century progressed. It transformed into a tragi-comic wandering, with male and female characters resigned to never finding a meaningful and happy life. Through an ambiguous philosophy of modern man as an outcast, the author attempts to incorporate almost all the significant events of the 20^th century, starting with the First World War, the rise of Bolshevism in Ukraine, which leads Jefima’s descendants to move to Europe - to Sudenten Reichenburg (Liberec) – where they suffer under Hitler and are then expelled from the Sudetenland to a life in exile in Germany or New York. Through the exterior framework of events, which is sometimes depicted by the author as a panopticon ringed with flames, there penetrates the prenatal song of Jefim, an earthy man, the grandfather of the family, an indestructible figure, immortal in myth and in reality. It is no surprise when the reader meets with him again at the close of Brycz’s narrative meanderings in the deserted area around Ukraine’s Chernobyl. While the grandfather never leaves the motherland and becomes a myth or icon, a saint who blesses all his descendants, his son Theodor marries the widow of a German soldier in Liberec and has two sons, Roland and Kurt. Kurt emigrates to the West, Roland remains (the reference to the Chanson de Roland is clear) and has two children, Kryštof and Vladimír, with his Czech wife, Květa; these can be considered to be the central figures in Brycz’s complicated “story of the century”.

In  Patriarchátu dávno zašlé sláva, the writer attempts to resurrect the “novel-river” model of Galsworthy or Tolstoy, but unlike the writers mentioned, he destroys the linear structure of the novel with bizarre episodes or the banality of the everyday. Patriarchátu dávno zašlé sláva is set entirely within the 20th century. The novella Sloni mlčí takes place over one year and the changes of the seasons, with the longest chapter being “Autumn Story”. The four sections are structured into ninety-three short chapters, shards of a mirror or diary extracts, recounting the cohabitation of Kryštof Rybář, a “former”, “dead” poet and now employee at an advertising agency, and Karolína, a primary school teacher. The poet is obviously the author himself and the female protagonist is a product of Brycz’s brief career as a teacher. At the start of the novel there is an absurd, Ionesco-like motif of a town where the municipal councillors raise elephants for no apparent reason. The strange nocturnal sounds, which the protagonists observe and which obviously emanate from the giant bodies of the elephants, bring to the otherwise realistic story of Kryštof and Karolína, sometimes characterized as a love story, the original poetic and alienating tone of a mysterious and at the same time demythifying Nature, which appears in Brycz’s real and at the same time fabulous town as a deus ex machina.
The conceptions of life and the city, which constitute the most common framework of modern man, merge, not only in this novella, but especially in Brycz’s poetry book Jsem město, into the form of a changeable, amoeba-like, sometimes friendly, sometimes malicious organism, which breathes through its own lungs and moves on its own limbs like some kind of Archeozoic creature. Although the organism of the city is anonymous and multilayered, behind it we sense the very specific presence of the North Bohemian town of Most, a place with a relocated Gothic cathedral, with the hilly salient of Hněvína, with the painted, ageing flats from the First Republic slowly transforming into anonymous housing estates, a labyrinth of nothingness and concrete. This organism in Brycz’s poems assumes a character which is archaic and heroic, charged with history and nostalgia, innocent and sinful, fairy-tale to Hollywoodesque, non-specifically poetic or specifically photographic and Sudek-like. In the hands of Brycz, a travelling circus has the same value as a cemetery, church, pub, hospital or a devastated and deserted factory. Unlike his bulky epics, where Brycz sometimes becomes a prisoner of his own circumlocution, the miniature texts in Jsem město are poetically concise and laconic, pointing more to depths than to a borderless expanse.To a certain extent this can also be said of Brycz the short-story writer. The short stories from the collection Miloval jsem Teklu (I Loved Tekla) are full of the changing reflections and illusory facets of love and its emptiness, and these can also be found in his latest book of short stories Malá domů (Passback To The Goalie). From the outset the author does not disguise the fact that these are amusing stories, a record of the palaver heard in cheap local pubs on the edges of society and away from the hecticness of civilization. Although the nostalgia and retrospective viewpoint provide a noble literary air of antiquity, a melancholic look back at what is almost lost today - a story suggestive of life being lived to the full and on a firm grounding - in Malá domů Brycz’s virtuosity and rush of images sometimes seem aimless. The author’s latest book for adults is Svatý démon [The Holy Demon] (2009), a bleak and poetic story of a man who tries to save himself but is given the task of saving the whole world.

(js)

This profile was last updated on August 1st 2009

Deutsch Pavel BRYCZ, Deutsch.doc

En français Pavel BRYCZ, En français.doc

Foreign rights

Dana Blatná Literary Agency, www.dbagency.cz

Review of I, City by Alfred Thomas (The Sarmatian Review, 3/2008)

Another review of I, City.