Authors

The Man with Breasts and the Story Thief – the remarkable debut in fiction of the thirty-four-year-old journalist, reporter (and traveller) Josef Formánek – is published by the popular Ivo Železný imprint. It has become one of the most successful works of Czech fiction of the beginning of the third millennium. Although its somewhat bizarre title suggests something of the kind, this is not a work whose main motive is humour, nor does it present a description of a mysterious anatomical anomaly. “Man with Breasts” is, it seems, a name given in Indonesia to Czech men in particular, or at least to tourists or men from the “Czech” part of the world; these appear to the natives to be uncommonly fat, hence corpulent – or “breasted”. This heavily ironic naming contains the essence of the marked differences in values of two worlds under comparison, worlds the protagonist of Formánek’s tale of adventure moves between. On the one hand we have a linear story located in a Eurocentric society with all its civilizational canons and rituals, a world to which post-1989 Czech society also belongs and which abounds in relative prosperity or least a sufficiency of everything – including staggering commercial debt and the incurable psychological frustration which the Czech Republic (and the book’s heroes) share with the whole of Atlantic civilization. On the other hand, there is an attempt to rationalize the incomprehensible, time-honoured world of aboriginal Indonesian tribes, an environment in which there persists an age-long adherence to mythical notions of good and evil and the bond between life and death. This is a world where humanity is reliant on the multifarious signs of the spirit; although this does not protect or rescue Indonesians in moments of danger (at least as these might be understood by the all-knowing European), it is the agent of a special harmony of the senses. The linchpins of Formánek's first work of fiction are how the two 'fictional worlds' and, simultaneously, the two parallel 'universes' or 'heterocosmoses' are confronted with one another, and, more important still, the quest for ways out of the blind alleys of civilization. The clash of ideas of two unhomogeneous mentalities thus described is placed in dubious harmony with the reality of Formánek's hero - a superficial, showy Czech 'superman' who has gone off the rails both morally and psychologically, and who even in his adult years staggers from a childish indulgence in sex and alcohol to a dreamer's longing for a greater incarnation which is difficult to comprehend and rationalize. This is a modern individual with a vision of a spiritual event; in the society of 'ordinary' central Europeans which is his own by more than mere necessity, this is never likely to happen. It is no coincidence that the focus of the work is sharpest in the passages set in Indonesia, in which the plot is at its most adventurous and the reader experiences a no less exciting adventure of the imagination. In the description of contemporary Czech society, the contours of plot and psychology are reminiscent of what in the 1970s was connected with the so-called North Bohemia School and the work of Vladimír Páral in particular. While the author describes the jungle of Indonesia with eloquent detachment, his description of the jungle of today's Czech Republic comprises for the most part contemporary clichés of theme and character. Further confirmation of Formánek's dexterity and resourcefulness as a storyteller - skills honed in his journalism - came with his second venture into fiction; this tale of high drama entitled The Flying Jaguar was created in a mere twenty-four hours, in the inquiring gaze of the public and the rarefied atmosphere of a publishing 'reality show'.

(vn)

E-mail: formanek@koktejl.cz

 This author profile was last updated in 2006

Deutsch Josef FORMÁNEK, Deutsch.doc

En français Josef FORMÁNEK, En français.doc