At the age of twenty-six, anthropologist and Mongolian specialist Petra Hůlová has published her third novel – and thus fulfilled one widespread sense (or perhaps one eager expectation) on the part of Czech literary critics: the somewhat unusual hypothesis that the new work would be a completely different, completely differently written, composed and tempered prose narrative than her debut Paměť mojí babičce (2002) or even her second novel Přes matný sklo (2004). Even the second work was surprisingly divergent, in fact so different from the Mongolian setting of the “Grandmother” that rumours began to circulate that “Opaque Glass” could be the work of a different author. All such slanders aside: the book was marked by a narrative style so altered as to be unrecognisable; this was an authorial voice altogether without parallels or likenesses in the first novel.

All of this, though, is worth recalling only on account of the possibility that the reader now encountering Hůlová’s third book, Cirkus Les Mémoires (published, like the two previous works, by Torst) who is unfamiliar with her previous achievements may well find it hard to believe the volume to be the work of the same author: one in fact young, at the outset of her career, in a sense still relatively inexperienced. None of these traits will seem believable to such a reader: for if there is one matter in which Hůlová displays true expertise, it is a wide palette of narrative finesse. (Composition, it must be said, is a different matter: story-lines start, in the course of writing, to crumble and dissolve, while post-modern narrative methods make their appearance only rarely.) On the other hand, this expertise equally attests to another possibility: Hůlová, a sovereign master of many variegated styles, still does not have her own individual voice, and may well take a long time to find it.

And yet this may not be the case, as long as the momentary state of her literary disposition seems suitable, and if she keeps to the resolution to write each new prose-work differently. It would seem that she has all the necessary pre-dispositions for such a literary career, and Cirkus Les Mémoires would seem, in a word, to confirm this view absolutely. If we did not know who the author actually was, we could, without blinking an eye, claim, and then back up such a claim, that we were not even dealing with an author of Czech origin! Quite a number of passages within the book reveal a more than attentive eye for modern American writing (and particularly cinema!) of the great metropolis – and yet other thematic areas and motifs in the novel likewise make evident reference to the recent prose-works of African and Asian writers in emigration in Europe or the USA (e.g. Salman Rushdie). In this, there is of course nothing wrong, and absolutely nothing unoriginal: Petra Hůlová is a writer marked by post-modernity, and structuring individual narrators’ sequences in the novel in the form of separate blocks forming a variation on one or another creative stance, is unquestionably far from a bad idea. Nonetheless, it is one that must be carried off well for it to work; for the related assemblages of allusions or citations appeared, within the overall text, as components of a larger literary symbiosis. And such a symbiosis demands a solid and serious philosophical basis. It would appear that such a unifying essence within Hůlová’s newest narrative voice as manifested in Cirkus Les Mémoires is an idea that in one sense has more than a bit of a fashionable ring, yet nonetheless represents one definitely realistic, or at least intellectually compelling, alternative for world developments: in other words, the thesis of the multi-cultural character of a rapidly globalising civilisation. Doubtless, one of its effects may well be a widespread adaptation, if not direct assimilation, to the cultural offensive of the “Atlanticist” West; nevertheless, all of the other cultures remain alive and inspirational, so numerous and so diverse, or in other words primarily forming a different and secondary, i.e. multi-culture. Such a multi-culture, in Hůlová’s formulation, is represented – even though (or precisely because) in the space of the North American megalopolis – a literal Babylon. Or rather, Babylon as the symbol of diffused or general confusion, even though here not a confusion of languages (all of the novel’s characters understand one another very well, and there never once emerges any impenetrable barrier of linguistic communication between them), but rather a racial, in other words ethnic one. For the contemporary world, as depicted by Hůlová in her “Circus”, is in fact first of all a gigantic multi-cultural and multi-ethnic contemporary Babylon, a world without end into which there flows an endless tide of other fates, an endless number of stories of still more and more human characters.

Among them, we do encounter the narrative line of a 28-year-old Czech woman photographer and stories of her relatives living in American emigration, yet in this gigantic labyrinth there is not much else that is particularly “typically Czech”. And the setting of the novel is not merely a physical, geographical Babylon, but indeed the labyrinth of contemporary reality, through which there run such a motley array of human stories – and their protagonists drag into this labyrinth their own memories, their own illusions, their feelings and emotions, the cobwebs of their lives and the tatterdemalion scraps of their relationships, until all together they form and create a kind of collective chronicle of several of humanity’s tribes. As if, then, based on this material, they were to write a kind of gigantic tribal memory, or in other words the “les mémoires” of the title.

It must be said, however, that Hůlová in no way makes a simple comparison of the ceaseless rush and relentless torrent of the staggering number of characters to a circus. The circus here represents only one of the motifs that make their imprint on the novel as a whole; it embodies the position of the nomad, the wanderer, the traveller endlessly searching for a new place, yet never for home. Something akin to a home undoubtedly is present in the characters’ own reminiscences, though at the same time indicating something that has already vanished from our present horizons. Indeed, as we can all see, the modern human subject has no point of absolute rest; is forever spurred on from one place to the next, continually yearning to bring one’s own widow’s mite to a general memory or memories. And so we make our way through the world; and our fates become, in the course of time, part of the bond of these collective memories of the human species.

Petra Hůlová has created little short of a supreme achievement from the standpoint of literary narration in this novel. As for its reception among readers, or the previously cited readers’ expectations with respect to her third volume, the evaluation of the work could be significantly more mixed. It is the personal view of the present reviewer that this exemplary post-modernist fragmentation of narratives into pieces and scraps of partial stories and fates, of necessity interwoven with expert skill and more than once overlapping or even at times re-emerging to intersect at precisely the least opportune moment, is a brilliant piece of post-modern prose, amply deserving (perhaps even created for) rapid translation into all major languages. Yet at the same time, there is a sense in which its author has not entirely behaved well to the circle of readers that she gained with her first book. Her multi-ethnic, multi-cultural polyphonic novel of the Babylon and the Labyrinth of contemporary civilisation may offer an entire grab-bag of stories, yet from it the idea of the story itself – just as is expected and appropriate for post-modernity – has vanished. In the eyes of the general reader, though, Hůlová is not likely to find much favour, and the book-buying public may well hew to the opinion that this method is not for them. And, that they would rather encounter a story with the tried-and-true beginning and end, in opposition to one that stands more on the intellect than the heart.

The new novel by Petra Hůlová is without end, as it is an ending left open, because the story continues that can never reach a climax, since it is a narrative never expected to end. How could there even be an end, or even a kind of final reckoning in the world of Babylons and labyrinths, in the gigantic human settlements that render Prague such a tiny, tiny village? Indeed, even the memoir as a genre cannot have a convincing ending, since it is written by an author whose memory is still alive. Hůlová has performed a great homage to human memory – yet it is my view that unfortunately this inescapable fact will be prized primarily by the critics – and not the readers.

Vladimír Novotný