Authors

He emigrated to France in April 1989. From 1996-1997 he returned to Prague and worked as a newspaper and radio reporter and translator from French. He has translated W. Martens’s book The First and Second Europe (1995) and M. Winock’s History of the Extreme Right in France (1998). At the end of the 1990s he began publishing short stories and other literary texts in Czech periodicals suchs as Revolver Revue and in the critical sections of Lidové noviny, Respekt, Prostor, Babylon, etc. He also had texts published in the exile magazines Revue K (Paris), Západ (Toronto) and Fragment (Bratislava). The Lyon-based magazine Le Croquant also published some of his short stories. He now lives in Prague and is an editor for the weekly magazine Respekt.

In an interview with Michael Špirit (Revolver Revue no. 61) Jaroslav Formánek recalls the time when Jiří and Běla Kolář were clearing out their home in France after deciding to move back to the Czech Republic. There were hundreds of books and catalogues, old maps and art reproductions, all to be used in Kolář’s collages. In the art studio they came across a bottle of whisky. They became drunk during the clear-out and when in the evening they leant out of the window to the street where they had thrown this “artistic rubbish” they saw the most delightful collage and homage to Kolář which had been created by the Paris wind and the tyres of the passing cars. In a surreal manner the remains of the work had come together in Paris and then dissolved away into its bowels. It would appear that Jaroslav Formánek as an author of short stories, “diary novels” and novels, and as a journalist and reporter, which he occasionally declares himself to be, is a natural artist very much in the mould of Kolář’s ideal. He does not invent stories, he does not want to overarch a story which is rooted in space and time. He works with literary and non-literary material and with whatever he picks up, like a pebble from a path. From the small stones of experiences and fragments of reality he puts together a skilful, interlocking mosaic, during the creation of which he is more of a resonating medium than an artisan. When reading his texts the feeling arises that they were written against his will or were the fruit of a permanent literary automatism and fountain. It is only gradually, from his detailed, chiselling manner of writing that the entity as a whole emerges, an author standing apart from his generation, a writer whose current fate is solitude. In the novel Francouzský rok, written as a diary, though again resembling a collage, a mosaic with sources from other parallel entities, Formánek confronts contemporary French reality and the everyday without appearing as a writer, more as a runner in a deserted landscape. It is significant that in the shorter prose texts collected in his book Beze stop, there is a similarity to Francouzský rok in the key idea behind the word emptiness. If artists and writers from the already classical 20th century were “pilgrims to infinity”, vagrants under the stars and in the deep furrows of hollows and valleys (Czeslaw Milosz), then Formánek is to be found in the same avant-garde approach to art as Jiří Kolář, who is not on a pilgrimage to some place and thing, but rather on a Kerouac-like journey from place to place, from one destination and existence to another. The way in which Formánek perceived Paris and gradually submerged himself into the French waters is reminiscent of the experiences of another Czech exile, the writer and essayist Lubomír Martínek. Naturally, with Martínek there were clear reasons for his exile and nomadic existence which had been brought about by the misery of Czech totalitarianism and was internally justified by the oppressive historical situation. Formánek left for France just before the November revolution at a time when it was starting to be clear that there were going to be changes within Central Europe. However, in Paris Jaroslav Formánek endured all that which goes along with emigration. No matter how much he tried to earn he was dependent on charity, he established contacts and friendships with Czech emigrants (mainly with J. and B. Kolář, with the Škvoreckýs in Toronto and with the circle around Tigrid’s magazine Svědectví). At the same time, however, he did not want to be a Czech Frenchman, labelled a refugee, but rather someone cosmopolitan or homeless, who enjoys the colouring of the Parisian and French light in a manner which has perhaps not been mentioned since the time of Monet or Seurat. However, the French light is the one constant, the one lasting fragrance from the land of the Gallic rooster. Even today’s French people speak English more than their mother tongue and are dealing slowly and painfully with the process of globalization. An undertone to Formánek’s Francouzský rok is the journalistic wave and media communication which substitutes a person’s authentic being with an eruption of frantic news and information from the radio, newspapers, television and the internet. Through the filter of reports on political, social and sometimes also commercial events the author observes in his “diary novel” the remains of clues and impressions of lasting values, whether that is the world of artefacts and ideas, or just the atmosphere of parks, the silhouettes of the city surrounded by trees and the shadows of Parisian corners from which has vanished all “cursed” poetry. Therefore, Francouzský rok is a book which destroys the myth of the civilized and cultured city. In the style of the Beatnik underground or even Gauguin, Formánek wants to grasp in a French, but also in a Central European reality, the source of savage purity, not corresponding to the resurrection of Baudelairean chimaera, but returning to the savagery of Artaud, Rimbaud and even to the riotousness of the medieval rebel Villon. The anchors for these madmen have of course been pulverized at the bottom of the ocean by banality and the onrushing of a history without magic or significance. In Francouzský rok Formánek sounds slightly like a sceptic and contemporary prophet of the apocalypse, who does not need to take into his inner world the weakness and strength of romantic individualism, but for whom it is enough to keep watching the television and to note the passing of time in the unconnected fragments of proclaimed normality into which everything flows. Formánek’s intuition and ability to record is apparent in Francouzský rok, as well as in his literary debut, Dlouhá kakaová řasa. Here the writer incorporates phenomena and fragments of stories and events into a mosaic, though in the naive style of a child. The sometimes abrupt short stories and dreamlike poems from the collection Beze stop touch on a magical, free, empty space, the entr’acte of existence, the intermezzo lasting longer than one would wish or be able to imagine. Despite this, in Beze stop Formánek’s work demonstrates the same symphonic nature and homogeneity as in Francouzský rok. Home, or that which we call home, blends with the picture of the other country which we wish to learn about and live in, but which also treacherously devours and drags into its stream. It would seem as though Jaroslav Formánek is the prototype homeless artist, cultivated and carefully reflecting on the people sleeping on the ground, on park benches or beside bins, still warming themselves with that which civilization throws them.

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This author profile was last updated in 2008.