Authors
Bohuslav VANĚK-ÚVALSKÝ
A writer of fiction and verse, Bohuslav Vaněk-Úvalský (real name Bohuslav Vaněk) was born in Prague on 13 February 1970. He attended the School of Printing. In 1993 he founded Krásné nakladatelství, whose modest publications include a number of his own works. He first worked for advertising agencies, then as an editor for Redhot magazine. Since 2002 he has been an editor on the daily Mladá Fronta Dnes. He lives in Prague.
Although Bohuslav Vaněk-Úvalský declares himself the author of nine books, some are still in manuscript and others are not widely accessible. He first entered the public consciousness with Zabrisky, which he describes as a novel, though it seems to share no features of the classical novel structure based on a linear, or non-linear, even Postmodern, narrative plan. Vaněk-Úvalský’s home territory is the prose mosaic, arising from his sense of the grotesque in situations and in language, but above all from his sense of the atmosphere of a given period in time. In Zabrisky the writer-narrator tells the story of a writer-innocent, but under the implacable baton of an ostensibly invisible writer-know-all. This novel works with the assumption that manipulation of facts is the only driving force in the Postmodern media society and that virtual reality, that anonymous and nameless cyberspace, and other new, as yet unknown phenomena, spring from this tired old world mechanically. Yet what is to be done, in a modern community, by the artist who has nothing but vices and who works his way out of depression by acts that only lead to worse depression? His only option is, like some new-age deus ex machina or hired hack, to operate with confidence in the sphere of B-list or trash literature, unable to dream of a truly great book published under his own name. An author can then ‘survive’ his narrative by conceiving it from the outset as pure reflection in a mirror and by, for example, exhibiting, to himself and others, the pretence of certainty as the sole certainty; this state of affairs then becomes a timeless phenomenon sui generis. In his novel Poslední bourbon (The Last Bourbon), the author is an utterly autobiographical narrator, poet and proprietor of a publishing house, leading the reader into the present day, for which he has found the imaginative, witty, but ultimately depressing name of ‘mental crematorium’. The term applies specifically to the membership of the (Czech) Society of Writers, though is undoubtedly not intended to denigrate specific individuals: the Society’s members move in a completely different time and space. Poslední bourbon is not a sentimentalist’s portrayal of the life of début writers who have remained, since the Changes of November and December 1989, sidelined and overlooked. It is a text full of comic and ironic situations, which ultimately has the ring of a tragicomic death-knell, or at least a memento, directed at the pragmatism in Czech literary culture. For in that context there is not a whit of understanding for the generation of writers that calls itself up-and-coming. The retrospective prose mosaic with the deliberately quirky title Brambora byla pomeranč mého dětství (The Potato was the Orange of My Childhood) looks at first like the next in the endless line of ‘latest books about childhood’, of which there were so many in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nowadays, however, this type of narrative is unstinting in addressing both the political reality and sundry social phenomena of that age. But these features and the broad burlesque of history recede into the narrative background, the centre of gravity being events that apparently befell the author and tales from the Prague suburbs told from the viewpoint of a boys’ gang. A key to the Czech world of about 25 years ago is provided by an idiosyncratic glossary of terms and realia printed in parallel to the text proper.
(vn)
Deutsch 
Bohuslav VANĚK-ÚVALSKÝ, Deutsch.doc
En français Bohuslav VANĚK-ÚVALSKÝ, En français.doc
