Authors

Michal Viewegh enjoys extraordinary popularity among readers. More than 750,000 copies of his books have been printed; they have been translated into twenty languages and adapted many times for film and the stage. When one bears in mind that this author’s work is to a great extent autobiographical, we should be aware of a certain extra-literary aspect to the Viewegh phenomenon. Viewegh is a figure well known from the media, and his presence in his writing (which has its basis in the interplay of reality and fiction) is reminiscent of a reality show; by the medium of fiction the reader is acquainted with the writer’s life as it really is, and as this is presented in the media. This invests the work with an additional layer of quasi-authenticity, allowing the reader to experience the story on two levels. Viewegh’s debut work of prose was Views on a Murder (1990), in which the plot of a detective story provides a pretext for the finely drawn characterization of human relations in a small town. A diversity of viewpoints supports the author’s efforts to “get at the truth with all its inconsistencies”. Since the very outset of his career Viewegh has invested his work with a sense of irony, an attention to detail, effects of alienation, a keen appreciation of psychology and skilful storytelling. Viewegh emerged as a master storyteller with his thus far unsurpassed second work, The Wonderful Years of Lousy Living (1992). In this story of one family the author depicts crucial moments in recent Czech history, from the 1960s, through the years of Normalization up to the fall of the communist state. With bravura and humour Viewegh shows how “small” and “large” histories merge. (One thinks here of the scene set in the early moments of the 1968 Occupation, in which the protagonists paste up notices announcing the loss of a budgerigar when everyone else is pasting up political fliers.) Although the adult heroes are seen to make compromises with the totalitarian regime, the author does not judge them; he shows us that everything is more complex than it appears on the surface. This view – humorous but not oversimplified – of certain awkward moments in recent Czech history was a source of relief to a majority of readers. The opening scene – in which our main hero is born in the course of a performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – is the earliest instance of Viewegh’s compulsion to criticize by irony pseudo-intellectualism and fraudulence in people’s attitudes to life and art. The figure of the writer and reflection through writing are themes which run through much of Viewegh’s work. The Wonderful Years of Lousy Living was published with perfect timing, and it received great acclaim; the author’s later works – though successful commercially – remain somewhat in its shadow. For the most part these later works have been characterized by the critics as “refreshing but not cleansing”. Beginning with the novella Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia (1994) – a kind of postmodern mutation of the fairy tale of the sad princess, in which the heroine is woken up to life, and the family again features as a theme – the storyline is supplemented with motifs attractive to readers of popular literature. The typical Viewegh tale is a love story (eg., A Novel for Women), sometimes with a touch of the crime novel (eg., The Case of Unfaithful Klára). There is often some connection with the polemic on what is and what is not literary kitsch as this is drawn from life. It should be noted that conflict and polemics – sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes counterproductive – have accompanied Viewegh throughout his career. His prose is entertaining, highly readable, topical, technically inventive (and, we might add, remarkably well marketed): all these things are attractive to the “common” reader. His comments on the writing process (see Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia, The Excursionists, The Creative Writing Class), the intertextuality of his work, and his meditations on how literature manipulates reality frequently hold the attention of the intellectual. It is with the publication of Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia that we locate the origins of a major source of conflict between the author and the literary critics; the former wished to be a “liaison officer”, operating between high and commercial literature. According to the critics, this was inappropriate from a moral point of view – the criticism encompassed a deprecation of the “consumer” hero, who is in the thrall of material plenty – and it forced the exclusion of “more serious” themes in favour of the “banal”. The author – who publishes a new book almost every year – reacted to the criticism, not for the first time, with something bordering on hysteria (which he voices in his work by the ridiculing of certain identifiable critics), raising the question of whether the vehemence of his defence was not a sign of insecurity. The fact remains that no matter how mundane or trivial his subject, Viewegh maintains his bravura and shrewdness as a storyteller; he does this in spite of the fact that for some time he has restricted his thematic focus to the tribulations of the famous writer in his dealings (mainly) with women. With the benefit of hindsight, we might claim that discussion of the work of Michal Viewegh has generated something of value: a debate over the shabbiness of “commonplace man”, the theme of the relation between private and public life, a critique of the intellectual cliché, a defence of literature as a game played with reality. A notable example of the author’s output we have so far failed to mention is The Wonderful Years with Klaus (2002), Viewegh’s attempt to pick up the threads of his successful second work. The decade that has elapsed since the Velvet Revolution allows little space for historical upheaval; still, the figure of the book’s title is emblematic of his era. At base and at its heart, this is a work which engages with its time, placing itself in firm opposition to the arrogance of a certain political party. On a less fundamental, more expansive level it provides us with a family chronicle, which is typical of Viewegh. It is far from being the first time we have stood by as the narrator’s marriage disintegrates, followed by the establishing of new relationships which culminate in the founding of a new family. What is striking in this novel is the sounding of the melancholic chords of ageing, an appreciation of the finite nature of life, a taking stock of life hitherto. This theme is explored more fully in Playing Pig-in-the-Middle (2004), a mosaic of the lives of a number grammar-school classmates, the telling of which is more terse and low-key than is typical of Viewegh. This latter work was judged by the critics to be his most successful with the exception of The Wonderful Years of Lousy Living. We also find in the collection Stories of Marriage and Sex (1999) the sorrowful tones of estrangement in love, which at times are reminiscent of Chekhov. We should also mention Viewegh’s genuinely humorous work, which is influenced by Czech and non-Czech (eg., Woody Allen) sources alike. This part of Viewegh’s oeuvre comprises two volumes of literary parody under the title The Ideas of a Kind Reader (1993, 2000); genre is also subjected to parody in A Novel for Women (2001). Viewegh shows himself to be a keen and witty observer in two selections of newspaper columns, published as Smorgasbords (2000) and On Two Stools (2003). His sole venture into drama is the stage play A Rose for Markéta (written in 1990, published in 2004), which is an ironic portrayal of events at Prague’s Faculty of Arts in the period immediately after the Velvet Revolution.

(jn)

The profile was updated in March 2006

Deutsch Michal VIEWEGH, Deutsch.doc

En français Michal VIEWEGH, En français.doc

www.viewegh.cz + Facebook

NAKLÁDALOVÁ, Lenka. Deutsches und tschechisches Erzählen nach der Wende: T. Brussig und M. Viewegh schreiben über die kommunistische Geschichte (Diplomarbeit. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2006).

Foreign rights

Dana Blatná Literary Agency, www.dbagency.cz