Authors
Petra HŮLOVÁ
The novelist Petra Hůlová was born in Prague on 12 July 1979. After passing the matriculation examination at secondary school Petra Hůlová studied both Cultural and Mongolian Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Prague’s Charles University. She has spent time in Mongolia and the United States of America, and is currently working on a doctorate in Culturology at Charles University. Hůlová was awarded the Magnesia Litera Prize (2003), Jiří Orten Prize (2007) and Josef Škvorecký Prize (2008). She lives in Prague.
Hůlová’s debut work – with the intimate, pointedly retrospective and somewhat curious title Paměť mojí babičce [My Grandmother’s Memory] – met with an enthusiastic response from the Czech Republic’s reading public. Here was a young writer of prose who had an obvious gift, and her chosen theme was an unusual one in the context of Czech writing today. It tells of life in ‘exotic’ Mongolia, more specifically the stories of several generations of Mongolian women living in villages and towns which skirt the desert. The topic is in perfect accord with the author’s study interests, and her tale gives neither the sense of being coloured for exoticism or of being a description of life in a country where the culture and mentality are different from those of author and reader. In the spirit of the European literary tradition, Hůlová concentrates for the most part on the Mongolian ‘everyday’, which means that the demographics she presents us with see the mingling of a number of ethnic populations, with the consequent display of the capacity to respect (or not to respect) the other in real, rather than generalized terms. The focus of the work is on the lives and fortunes of particular women. It presents strong, sensitive character studies of highly distinctive women. The lives and experiences of each of the women interact, as these draw to their close or grow to maturity. While in this latter regard Hůlová’s debut has much in common with feminist writing today, it has no wish to proclaim a thesis or to highlight differences between the sexes. Every occurrence in the composition of everyday realities is created first and foremost by some kind of cultural memory; the social norms of today form the basis for models and patterns of behaviour, which themselves determine the actions of the protagonists as well as the novel’s more episodic characters. A thematic or philosophical starting point emerges from this state of affairs and thinking in outline only; emphasis is placed on keen analysis of the psychology of the characters rather than on a synthetic cognition which would allow them to liberate themselves from the fatalistic conception of the ‘woman’s lot’. The narrative is studded with words and turns of phrase in Mongolian. For her second work, the short novel Přes matný sklo [Through Frosted Glass], Petra Hůlová leaves behind the ‘exoticism’ of Mongolia for an environment far more familiar to the Czech reader, although its scenes of domesticity have something of the bizarre, the frivolous and the curious. They show the part-deranged, part-‘natural’ inner life of several ‘ordinary’ people living in post-war and then post-1989 Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic. The author has given the characters of this work a subtle tempering. While the characters of the Mongolian work fight with energy and resolve against a given set of circumstances, those of Through Frosted Glass are all unhappy, their thinking stuck down a blind alley, a ‘dungeon of darkness’ for both reason and emotion. The characters of the latter are incapable of overcoming their short-sightedness – the result of an intellectual infatuation – even though they are full of good intentions and wish in the main to do the right thing and to support their loved ones. The biggest problem is that they are not fit for meaningful interaction with others, so that their closest relationships are blighted (sometimes tragically) by a mutual lack of understanding, an abdication of responsibility, and a gradual, if not complete loss of the sense of self. Although Hůlová acknowledges emotional problems prevalent today – notably in her story of a young man who suffers from an incurable sociophobia – at its base her tale is about the attitudes of the generations of parents and grandparents (i.e. that which bears the social stigma of February 1948 and that which was traumatized by the events of August 1968 and April 1969); the members of each have been condemned to a static interpretation of history and a passive philosophy of life. Her second work gives further confirmation that Hůlová’s early narratives have their basis in episodes, outlines, shortcuts and vivid character study. They are less concerned with epic thought or the stark delineation of social problems. In this respect, Hůlová’s writing is reminiscent of the distinctive psychologizing of Radislav Nenadál and Irena Dousková, casting as it does a dusky, cheerless light on “dozens of half-secret, hidden histories”.
(vn)
The profile was updated in 2004.
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Petra HŮLOVÁ
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