Authors

He is a member of the artistic group Vítrholc, which publishes joint miscellanies, puts on performances and also has presentations on its webpages (www.vitrholc.cz ). He lives in Brno and supports Brno FC. He divides literary critics; however, he brings an interesting contemporary perspective to Czech literature which it would be a shame to overlook. Škrabal – in the fictional realms of literature – is not ashamed of the fact that he lives a banal, unheroic life. On the contrary, he uses it as a theme in his texts: “Stupid work / stupid boss / no money / annoying wife / television sex / and once a week / idiot referees / form the regular background / to the life of an ordinary guy…” he writes in his poem Náš styl [Our Style], and at first glance we have no reason not to believe him. The thematic range of Škrabal’s work appears to be markedly limited. The author basically has three or four obsessive motifs: Brno vs Prague, football, and the relationships between men and women – and above all of these, like a spirit above water, hovers a kind of stoical posture which his “lyrical” hero adopts towards life in today’s world. However, through the use of banal themes the poet slowly grapples with the whole universe. Let us first examine the author’s self-proclaimed Brnophilia. This was embodied in the title of his debut collection, Zapalte Prahu [Burn Prague], which is a popular slogan among non-Prague football fans. Of course we are not taken in: the feeling of belonging to Moravia and Brno (and particularly the Brno complex about Prague) is stressed so much here that the reader becomes suspicious of ironical ruses. And this also sometimes becomes completely transparent – for example in the ridiculing Odbočka na Moravu [Turn-off to Moravia] where the author ironically demasks his firmly idealised country in the virtual world of a computer game. However, apart from on an anecdotal level, the author has also been able to use the motif of the Moravian city as a metaphor for displacement, failure, a small life as opposed to the chimera of great dreams: “It is sad to be at the side/ in a city / which stands apart” or “Girls, you don’t know what you want / Girls, you are unhappy with life / Girls, you want to move to Prague/ we all have the feeling sometimes / that we deserve more from life.” (There are days when everyone would move to Prague). Škrabal’s poetic model has the form of a typical quadrangle (work, pub, football, television), which has been perfectly de-lyricised and demythisized: “International Woman’s Day is no longer celebrated / There are no murders on Christmas Day / and at Easter / no-one rises from the dead” (Svátky) [Holidays]. Škrabal’s hero (despite the continuous use of “I” we do not identify him with the author) is the perfect anti-rebel, who can calmly say about himself: “I do things which impress wives”. But it is precisely here that the mask slips slightly from the author as he does not write simple confessions, he stylizes, typifies and often shows things off in a bad light in order to achieve his goal of revealing the life of the modern everyman (naturally without the satire of Páral). From collection to collection Škrabal reveals more of himself – at the expense of humour, he allows his own true anxieties to be heard (“…everything is interesting to you until the moment / when it seems to you I’ve stopped fulfilling my role / I’m not interesting to you, it interests you how I fulfil my role // Soon I’ll be old, I’ll get sick / and snuff it / And what was life all about?” (Sebelítostný email manželce) [Email of Self-pity to the Wife]. His dry, descriptive “totally realistic” style is reminiscent of Ivo Vodseďálek, while the casual style sometimes reveals Škrabal’s readings of the American poets. The author’s second collection carries the motto “Cream is something extra”, which is expanded upon in the following poem: “…Girls have already dealt with many things / but they have still never talked about real love // Girls are unable to talk about / what lies behind every relationship // Girls never talk together about cream.” I would venture to say that at his best Karel Škrabal is a poet of a very individual metaphysics, if by that we understand looking behind the screen of the everyday and the automatization of perception – and not just the verbal gathering of philosophical and sacred props. I am not denying that several of his poems could be labelled as being only anecdotal, forced or superficial, one-dimensional literary photographs, but when he is able to insert into his text a rift which allows us to see the world and ourselves without any embellishments, then the “something extra” is worth it.