Authors

Since the beginnings of his literary and artistic work, Tomáš Přidal, the poet, prose writer, artist, typographer and illustrator exclusively linked with the Brno publishing house Větrné mlýny, has been searching for possibilities and exceptions. He discovers rifts and apertures in reality which allow him to squeeze through the looking-glass into the landscape beyond, into a world of greater variety and greater proportions, into a space which transforms before one’s eyes and takes on a new significance with each motion of the author’s imagination. As a member of the A. I. V. surrealist circle – together with Blažej Ingr, David Jařab, Bruno Solařík and Roman Telerovský – he defined his relationship with reality through the concept of blue humour. In a collage of aphorisms, film scripts, anecdotes and dramatic texts, not published of course until 1998 under the title Penězokazi, they produced literary improvisation in the spirit of the unrestrained Dadaistic “tomfoolery” of early Voskovec and Werich, immersing the reader in a refreshing and cleansing bath of mystifying and paraphrasing humour without jokes, of unleashed fun, which fuses practical joking with folk literature and legacies of surrealism, and shows a particular predilection for absurdity and nonsense as a legitimate means of response to the world. After A. I. V. broke up in 1996, or more precisely after Telerovský, Solařík, Jařab and Ingr became members of the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group, Tomáš Přidal remained creatively isolated. His texts from the second half of the 90s and from the present, presented in five books to date, from the debut title Všechno má barvu mýdla to the most recent volume Kokosová opice, loosen the programmatic links with the surrealist conception of humour: from parodic and sarcastic barbs, from irony and absurdity as blatant attacks “against the established links of humour” (Bruno Solařík) he moves on to a lyrical, colourfully dreamy humour whose source is reality’s magicorealist enchantment with itself and the joy which comes from the possibility of varying and transforming this reality through the imagination – he examines it with imaginary feelers and carries situations, events and the admirable individuals involved in them into his unique, slightly skewed funhouse, an ideal private dwelling. Kokosová opice is the book of an observer and of an exchange of roles. The shorter prose and poetic texts from which the slim volume is composed, short stories concluded with a punch line, minute-long novels concerning an entirely objective world – these can easily be visualized and transferred from words into parallel comic-book panels or frames of an animated film. They are usually set in a town, often in a house, in a flat, in a room; the space is delimited, demarcated, but at the same time – to allow the total permeability of the border between reality and the dream-tinted idea – open to all sorts of overlaps and incursions: “In our tomcat lives someone else,” Přidal informs us in one of the texts; in another story “the house is a three-storey animal”; in yet another “octopus spills across the town”. Fauna and flora, which almost entirely supplant the human element in the author’s writing, which spontaneously expand through words and grow through sentences, which populate a landscape in whose outlines we come to recognize an affinity with, among others, Jorge Luis Borges and his Fantastic Zoology, with the poetic phenomenology of Lukáš Marvan or with Michal Ajvaz’s unbridled flights of fancy – these animals and these plants symbolically put into practice Derrida’s concept of deconstruction. Let’s surrender at least part of the territory which reason has colonized to our instincts and desires, says Přidal the demiurge, let’s discard pragmatism and in its place let’s momentarily substitute simple unreason, let’s exchange vigilance for reverie, let’s step out from the civilized landscape towards the wilderness. Let’s become aware, as Ajvaz writes in one poem from the book Vražda v hotelu Intercontinental, that “no space is enclosed / no space is our domain” – that “our best course is… / to adapt to their customs, their ancient order / and to behave humbly and quietly. We are guests.” The world which Tomáš Přidal spontaneously populates in his books is mysterious and attractive. Through them flow masses of energy whose origin we gradually recall: the creative return to the worry-free mischievousness of a child, a boy who wants to play, is more sympathetic to the reader in that, at least in this regard, he and the author find common ground.

Foreign rights

Dana Blatná Literary Agency, www.dbagency.cz