Authors
Emil HAKL
The fiction writer and poet Emil Hakl (real name Jan Beneš) was born in Prague on 25 March 1958. He graduated from the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory, and then did a number of menial jobs. In the 1990s he was a copywriter for an advertising agency, and in 2001 an editor on the literary journal Tvar. In the late 1980s he co-founded ‘Moderní analfabet’ (The Modern Illiterate), an informal literary association, and later collaborated with the ‘Pant Klub’ (Hinge Club) and the ‘Literární a kulturní Klub 8’ (The Literary and Culture Club 8). Holder of the Josef Škvorecký Award (2010). He lives in Prague.
‘Well, all your stories have a total of about two topics,’ the narrator’s father sighs at one point in Emil Hakl’s novel O rodičích a dětech (Parents and Children). The thematic coordinates, as well as the poetic quality of this work, do in fact basically overlap with the coordinates and qualities of both Konec světa (End of the World), which is his first collection of stories, and his next work, the novel Intimní schránka Sabriny Black (The Private Receptade of Sabrina Black), and also, in some respects, with his preceding two collections of verse. In the novel O rodičích a dětech, which is a dialogue of tragic, grotesque contours between a son and his father, we become immersed in an intuitive stream of pointed, poeticized mini-tales and mini-dramas. Together with the author we wait for the ‘moment when the cataract of habit rips, when something, anything, finally happens’. The focal point of Hakl’s narrative is Jan Beneš, the author’s alter ego. His writing retains an expressly topocentric quality: all the action is set within a few square kilometres of Prague in the 1990s. Hakl emphasizes his total preoccupation with volatile reality, which he transposes into words, and his immeasurable fascination with the ‘hot, electronic world, which is charged with signals and messages’, as he wrote in the novel Intimní schránka Sabriny Black. Beneath the showy, alcoholic, erotic shell of his verse and fiction hides the hypersensitive outsider, whom the magic word provides with space for the sublimation of internal existential traumas. O rodičích a dětech also brings one pronounced novelty to the world of Hakl’s fiction: a sharp authorial change from the outer mode to the inner. Whereas the two preceding books could function persuasively as a detailed, personal map of the social climate in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s, offering the reader an opportunity to identify safely with collectively valid experience, his third work of fiction reconstructs a now exclusively individual mythology of a pair of central characters. The journey of a father and son through the Letná and Stromovka parks in Prague and the quarter of Bubeneč is one that moves from a position akin to that of the poet-artist Jiří Kolář’s eyewitness to movement and change in the surrounding world to, on the one hand, the concentrated, introspective position in which all other characters are at best supernumeraries. Hakl’s dialogical mining in the seam of a father and son’s memories now aims to reconstruct the memory of a family, to exhaust the lower storeys of the family tree, and, on this ground plan, to uncover at least part of the code of one’s own existence in the setting of the here and now. The coherent, inward-looking expression that Hakl applies in his fiction, and in which he now completely dissolves his earlier, spiteful invective against the ‘touchingly stupid population’ and all those ‘active, clean-shaven optimists with loosened neckties’ –, follows not only from the absolute linearity of the narrative, but also from the very character of the writing. The authorial orientation to the spontaneously poetic current of direct speech, which is an authentic transcription of the pub idiom, with all its expressiveness, places Hakl among the continuators of the literary legacy of Bohumil Hrabal and, on the other hand, brings him closer to the style of Václav Kahuda, a member of Hakl’s own generation. Whereas the point of the Hrabal-like babbling is to find poetic ‘pearls on the bottom’, the total realist Hakl presents the reader with the confession of a man who recognizes, with the wise aloofness of the sceptic, that he often does not know what to do with himself, very often has the feeling that ‘life is passing by under our very bottoms as if we were on a bus with a driver who’s just had a stroke’, and therefore simply no longer has time to search for those pearls. The same is largely true of Václav Kahuda, whose slightly affected, vigorous, little bunches of études fall, with fatal urgency and a desire for a metaphysical transcendence, into the infinite depths of the human universe and those fleeting, evasive moments ‘when in a human being the floor of everyday life gives away’. The self-ironical Hakl, by contrast, moves, more often than not, over the surface of things, sticking exclusively to reality, whose magical dimension appears to him spontaneously, as if by chance.
His book O rodičích a dětech [Of Kids and Parents] was made into a film in 2007 by Vladimír Michálek and was translated into English in 2007. Marek Tomin’s translation of Of Kids and Parents was nominated for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize in 2009 and was one of the seven books of the year in RALPH magazine.
His latest book Pravidla směšného chování [Rules of Peculiar Behaviour] has also met with success and was nominated for the Josef Škvorecký Prize, amongst others.
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Emil HAKL
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