Authors
Martin FAHRNER
The fiction writer Martin Fahrner was born in Jablonec nad Nisou on 18 March 1964. After secondary school in Náchod he attended the School of Education at Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, then studied dramaturgy at the Theatre Department of the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU), Prague. He has worked as a dramaturg in theatres in Jihlava, Pardubice and Brno, and is now back at the East Bohemian Theatre, Pardubice. Apart from fiction he also writes plays and song lyrics. He lives in Osikov.
Martin Fahrner came to fiction writing after years of experience not only in the theatre but also in the visual arts. His belated debut Steiner aneb Co jsme dělali (Steiner or, What We Were Doing) seemed to readers and critics a mature work, even though he had apparently set out solely on paths that represented the traditional narrative line of the twentieth century. In this work, a lyrical reminiscing or mosaic of reminiscences of childhood and adolescence, the writer has chosen to put the greatest emphasis on the emotional persuasiveness of all the episodes of all the stories, as well as on the depiction of psychological nuances of the courses taken by the lives of several generations of an ‘ordinary’ family. In their reviews of Steiner some critics saw parallels particularly with the art of the psychological short stories of Ota Pavel, who for Fahrner represents the prototype of this method of making the authorial message intimate and his philosophy of life. Both writers share not only ‘narratorial kindness’, witty humour and ‘intoxicatingly bittersweet tenderness’, but also an attraction to episodic situations, resounding with society and history and, on the other hand, human beings who can bear the most credible witness to ‘what we were doing’, meaning what he, his family, friends and neighbours were doing. Not surprisingly, in this choice of style both Ota Pavel and Bohumil Hrabal, another ultimate creator of the little human ‘pearls on the bottom’, shine through the narration. Regardless of these details Fahrner’s first and so far only book for adults can rightly be interpreted as a Postmodern text: in it the writer abandons the epic novel and chooses instead a mosaic of suggestive stories. If elements of the epic do appear in Fahrner’s work, they do so only in a defamiliarized way, abbreviated, in detail.
(vn)
The profile was updated in 2006
Deutsch 
Martin FAHRNER, Deutsch.doc
En français Martin FAHRNER, En français.doc
