Authors

From 1991 he led the health department at the district authority in Chrudim and for a short time served as its assistant chairman. He has been retired since 2004 but continues to work part-time as a review doctor for the VZP (General Health Insurance). He lives in Pardubice.

From his experiences of  “a merry science dealing with sadder matters”, where being a foot-soldier of medicine supplied him with countless unusual characters and stories from his everyday work, the author developed as a natural humorist, who describes the ups and downs of his characters with the kindly overview of the custodian of their mortal frames and with a Chekhovian view of the ornamental tragicomedy of their lives, commonly employing the typology of Hrabal’s “small” or Gogol’s “superfluous” man. Although this social status of the main character met with the approval of the contemporary government forces in literature, from the outset Pecháček showed a willingness to describe this character in his dislocation from the illusory normality, in his cleansing ability to defy the hostile reality with passive resistance, idealism and inflexibility. In some ways this is in accordance with Jung’s conviction that “the world would be bleak without deviations from the norm”. In his debut work, Amatéři: Jak svět přichází o básníky [Amateurs: How The World Is Losing Poets] (1980), he broke through the doleful crust of the toothless small-town novel with a portrait of a student amateur dramatic society, which with enviable adolescent energy is rehearsing a decidedly unorthodox version of Tyl’s Forest Maiden. Specifically adapted themes became the basis for the series of feature-length films (written and directed by Dušan Klein) Jak svět přichází o básníky [How The World Is Losing Poets] (1982), Jak básníci přicházejí o iluze [How Poets Are Losing Their Illusions] (1984) and Jak básníkům chutná život [How Poets Are Enjoying Life] (1987). After the novella Červená rozeta (1981) and the collection Sladkokyselé povídky (1982), which to a certain extent were influenced by the need to provide expected thematic patterns and schematic dialogues, Pecháček escaped this mediocrity with the ballad Dobří holubi se vracejí (1985, film by Dušan Klein 1988), in which his interest in the inner strength of life’s down-and-outs focuses on the less than idyllic setting of an alcoholics’ recovery clinic. However, even more so than the social type and the setting, what lent the author’s style a distinctive quality was its affliction with an infirmity of the language, in particular a thorough representation and analysis of the period’s rigid phrases, from which Pecháček develops a life-giving humour, even if of course he remains on the right side of social satire. A gift for describing the deficits and stereotypes of communication characterises the poetic of his “administrative novel” Vážení přátelé, ano (1988, film by Dušan Klein 1989), which in the final days of the collectivist ideology not only makes fun of those living from day to day, as captured by Páral in his “lab report” Soukromá vichřice, but also describes the workings of the whole dreadful system within a distinctively sarcastic framework. The peak of Pecháček’s comic talent to date is the novel Osvobozené kino Mír (2002, Book Club Literary Prize 2002), where these characters and poetics are projected onto a family saga half a century before Communist rule. The author adds to this compelling conflict between the little man and Grand History the well-chosen theme of “the wonderful years that sucked”, where the nostalgic protagonists are unable to definitively deny or run away from any historical processes, even though they have brutally entered into their private lives. The novel’s mastery is supported by the frequent swapping of narrative perspectives, by magical elements, quotes and period documents of many styles – and, last but not least, by the composition of the prose, constructed like a succession of narrative genre pictures hanging in a gallery. Pecháček’s latest addition to the “poet” series – the “film fairy tale” Jak básníci neztrácejí naději [How Poets Aren’t Losing Hope] (2004) – confronts the characters with being forty, the crisis of middle age, and everyday Czech capitalism without illusions, such as might occur in the public sphere of a smaller town. The “maladjusted” and altogether sympathetic idealism of the main characters culminates in an understanding that if rebellion is to be useful, it has to take the rebel through a process of spiritual growth and an appreciation of the missing parts of his personality which transcend life (fatherhood), even though what remains in the expression of the text is substantially a product of the romantic and formal demands of the whole pentalogy’s eventual adaptation into the form of film.