Václav Kahuda

Václav Kahuda

Czech prose writer and author of novels, novellas and short stories. He was born in Prague on 8 November 1965.


Title Publisher Year Selected published translations Awards
Being (Bytost) Druhé město 2017
Wind, Darkness, Presence (Vítr, tma, přítomnost) Druhé město 2014
Streams (Proudy) Petrov 2001
Technology of an April Evening / Tale of the Basilisk (Technologie dubnového večera / Příběh o baziliškovi) Petrov a Host 2000
Thicket (Houština) Petrov 1999
Exhumation (Exhumace) Petrov 1998
Merry Misery (Veselá bída) Petrov 1997
The Tale of the Basilisk (Příběh o baziliškovi) Art forum 1992
Being
Bytost
Wind, Darkness, Presence
Vítr, tma, přítomnost
Proudy
Streams
Proudy
Technologie dubnového večera / Příběh o baziliškovi
Technology of an April Evening / Tale of the Basilisk
Technologie dubnového večera / Příběh o baziliškovi
Houština
Thicket
Houština
Exhumace
Exhumation
Exhumace
Veselá bída
Merry Misery
Veselá bída
Příběh o baziliškovi
The Tale of the Basilisk
Příběh o baziliškovi
Praise
Reading Thicket is a fantastical experience. Perhaps a unique one for our contemporary “young” prose. This is another reason why the book, as it unravels, demands to be read over and over again, from any place. Fortunately, its quality does not solely derive from its intellectual foundation, which together with its form is one of the few conceptually understandable aspects of the literary work.
—Ondřej Cakl
Aluze

He trained as a plasterer and while growing up he allegedly showed signs of being “a shy melancholic with a tendency towards discreet sadism”. He repaired facades, worked as a night watchman, an engineer at a sewage works, a heating operator and a gravedigger. He currently receives a disability pension. He was at the birth of the now legendary band, Tři sestry (Three Sisters). As part of a group of regulars at the Na Staré kovárně pub in the Prague district of Braník he set up Branické almanachy (Braník Almanacs). He has been published in the literary magazines Tvar, Vokno and Weles.

He made his literary debut with the novella/parable Příběh o baziliškovi (The Tale of the Basilisk, Artforum, 1992), assuming the raw narrator style of Bohumil Hrabal. This was followed by the novella Veselá bída (Merry Misery, Petrov, 1997). “Kahuda has put together an anatomical atlas of the dark side of Prague, a map of an organism which, although festering and oozing, is more life-giving and healthier than the polished, swaggering, cheaply marketed face of the city. With the thrusts of a frantic stoker Kahuda throws profligate lists of digressions and atrocities into his writing,” wrote Josef Chuchma in a review of the book.

There then followed the similarly styled Exhumace (Exhumation, Petrov, 1998), and his first large, partly autobiographical novel, Houština (Thicket, Petrov, 1999). “His writing really is a thicket of words of fascinatingly magical specificity, revealing a wealth of imagery and mercilessly accurate observations of snatches of life,” wrote Aleš Haman in Lidové noviny. Houština is again reminiscent of Hrabal, though it is more open in its sexual descriptions from early adolescence as well as sketchier in witnessing the disintegration of the narrator’s personality – Kahuda’s alter ego.

A year later Kahuda published a book of two novellas – the first, Příběh o baziliškovi, had been completely sold out after its first publication (for the same reason the publishers had to print another edition of Houština two years after its first publication), and the second novella was Technologií dubnového večera (Technology of an April Evening, Petrov, 2000). This is a plebeian, perverse dialogue between two pub writers.

The novel Proudy (Streams, Petrov, 2001) followed on from the previous work – the author’s sexual openness is not an end in itself, it is related to the Czech underground, it grows out of a boundless imagination and uses original and expansive language so that despite the banal theme it makes for demanding literature.

Readers had to wait thirteen years for Kahuda’s most recent novel, Vítr, tma a přítomnost (Wind, Darkness, Presence, Druhé město, 2014). It is over 700 pages long and is a series of episodic events structured as a detective-like quest concerning the death of the narrator’s grandfather, who disappeared during the Second World War. He plays around with genres, gives his analysis of Czechoslovak society following the November revolution, and there is Kahuda’s ever-present eroticism: “There is one long erotic scene, which is perhaps the best ever to have been written in Czech literature: it provokes and is filled with vulgarity, but at the same time it also has a sublime fragility, there is an element of love within it as well as ruinous lust, all of which is laced with a light perversity,” wrote Pavel Mandys for the newspaper Hospodářské noviny. On the one hand, Kahuda’s latest novel has been described as a brilliant “black light” spilling over our world, on the other hand, however, there are doubts about the readers’ ability to understand the book at all.

Contacts
E: kahuda@post.cz