Authors
Petr ŠABACH
The fiction writer Petr Šabach was born in Prague on 23 August 1951. He started at a middle school for librarianship, but after the first year changed to a regular secondary school. In 1969 he was expelled after failing to return from a holiday to Great Britain until October. He was taken back at the school for librarianship on an external basis, and after passing his school-leaving examinations he took a course by correspondence in the theory of culture at Charles University, Prague. Later he worked as technical editor, methodologist, night-watchman, and desk-officer; from 1987 he was employed at the Prague City Gallery. Since 2000 he has been a freelance writer. He lives in Prague. His short stories have been used by the scriptwriter Petr Jarchovský and the film director Jan Hřebejk as the basis for the film musical Šakalí léta (Jackal Years, 1993) and the film Pelíšky (Cosy Dens, 1999).
Petr Šabach continues the twentieth-century Czech tradition of humorous literature, particularly the work of Karel Poláček and Josef Škvorecký, by portraying a past reality through the eyes of a child. His basic form is the novel divided into several relatively independent, narratively self-contained episodes, resembling elaborate anecdotes. There is a nostalgia about Šabach’s portrayals of the period of his own youth in the Prague suburbs and he has a preference for first-person narrative. The source of the humour in his work is often the confrontation between a nonconformist boy or group of boys and the authoritarian generation of their parents, as in Šakalí léta and Opilé banány (Drunken Bananas), and elsewhere the interplay between male and female views of the world, as in Hovno hoří (Shit Burns) and Putování mořského koně (Travels of a Sea Horse). His grotesquely conceived portrayal of the lives of a set of characters from their birth to the end of the Communist régime in Babičky (Grannies) is in many respects reminiscent of Michal Viewegh’s Báječná léta pod psa (The Wonderful Dog Day Years) but without the latter’s sharp satirical tone. Šabach has only ventured beyond the family settings of his stories in the ‘small novel’ ‘Zumf’ (included in the collection Šakalí léta), concerned with the search for order in a virtual world that appears to its inhabitants – lively comic-book characters – as an absurd labyrinth in a time of imminent apocalypse, and Zvláštní problém Františka S. (The Peculiar Problem of František S.), a moralizing story that updates the legend of the Messiah (as do a number of other Czech stories of the 1990s) in the character of a patient from a modern mental institution. After taking hallucinogenic drugs František regularly returns to a ‘normal’ state and performs deeds akin to those of Christ and St Francis of Assisi. The considerable popularity of Šabach’s books has meant frequent new editions (particularly of Hovno hoří – twelve editions so far), but also incongruous groupings of texts; Jak potopit Austrálii (How to Sink Australia) and the novella Putování mořského koně were fortunately republished as separate volumes.
(eg)
Deutsch 
Petr ŠABACH, Deutsch.doc
En français Petr ŠABACH, En français.doc
