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A clumsy critique of Czech prose

Weak writing and poor editing produce a parody of scholarship

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 29th, 2007 issue

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A Handbook of Czech Prose Writing, 1940–2005

By Bohuslava Bradbrook
Sussex Academic Press, 156 pages

The first thing to know about Sussex Academic Press is that it isn’t very academic. The second is that it isn’t much of a press, either, though it is located in Sussex. If anything, it’s a vanity enterprise for authors suffering from delusions of learnedness — a diagnosis that certainly befits Bohuslava Bradbrook.
Her Handbook of Czech Prose Writing, 1940–2005 is a monument to arrogance and ignorance. Rather than a work of scholarship, Bradbrook’s effort might be more profitably compared to the minutes from a ladies’ book club in Zlín. It’s a treasury of pedestrian observations and middlebrow assertions, decorated with weak qualifiers and redundancies (“restricted confinement,” rather than more spacious varieties, perhaps).
Apparently it was beyond the means of Sussex Academic Press to press-gang an editor. Simple things such as the premiere date of Closely Watched Trains (1966, rather than 1973) might have been easily corrected. We’re told on page 45 that Ivan Klíma was the first to save Karel Čapek from neglect with his dissertation in 1962, though in her rambling preface Bradbrook had already bestowed that honor on critic Sergei Nikolskij from a decade earlier.
The presence of a proper editor might have introduced some novel clarity to Bradbrook’s prose. On Pavel Kohout’s Where the Dog is Buried we have this: “Tension in the book persists; the author’s ironic or bitter tone being sweetened by the mutual loyalty and solidarity of the dissidents, by the love and affection among the family members and, last but not least, by their tender feelings for their pet dog (a budgerigar, too), the symbol of human cruelty as well as the absurdity of the totalitarian system.”
A budgerigar is, of course, a parakeet. Does she mean that the characters’ “bitter tone” is sweetened by both a dog (a dachshund, to be precise) and a bird? And why is the poor dachshund a “symbol of human cruelty”? One is continually translating what it is that Bradbrook is struggling to convey, and it’s as thankless a task as mastering Ptydepe.
Other than scattered, perfunctory droppings of Čapek and Hašek’s names, it’s beyond Bradbrook’s capabilities to place authors within the context of their time or Czech literary tradition — surely a hallmark of “academic” writing. Egon Hostovský’s Pages from Exile might have been worth comparing to The Unwilling Tourist by his contemporary and fellow exile Adolf Hoffmeister, a writer who Bradbrook ignores completely.
Various works, we’re informed, are “likely to make readers think” while biographical elements “serve well their veracity.” Bradbrook is continually amazed by the depth that novellas are capable of achieving. Of Irena Dousková’s Someone with a Knife: “It may sound paradoxical, but this slender novel about a dull life is fresh, penetrating, witty and credible.” Viktor Fischl’s Kafka in Jerusalem “is only a slim book, but it contains much wisdom.” None of these celebrated qualities are ever displayed through quotations from the works being discussed, however.
Complementing her lack of ideas and originality is Bradbrook’s insensibility as a reader. “The author herself resents the lack of clarity in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,” she complains of Sylvie Richterová’s A Primer of Paternal Language, “but after the excellent beginning, when the excited reader rejoices in expectation of a good read, he or she may be disappointed by Richterová’s extensive use of unconnected snippets.” Might this, Ms. Bradbrook, be an example of irony?
Engorged with the hauteur of a provincial librarian, Bradbrook deigns to acknowledge that innovation and experimentation may “have their place in literature,” though clearly not on her doilied bookshelf. Her one nod to the avant-garde is given to Richterová, who “plays with the comma thoughtfully.”
Where Bradbrook’s handbook does become handy is in steering virgins and the elderly away from the carnal. Kundera’s later work “inclines almost to the pornographic;” Miloslav Švandrlík’s Black Barons “should have come with a cover warning: ‘Very strong, foul language.’ ” Of Jan Procházka: “As the author deals with the coarse military atmosphere, he feels obliged to use the appropriate jargon with its rough language, but … Procházka would not offend sensitive readers.” Thank God.
We need a critic of the caliber of a Martin Seymour-Smith to sift through the store of Czech writing and present a cogent argument for the nation’s literature. Until then, it’s better to go without such scholarship than to wade through Bohuslava Bradbrook’s cherished bromides and Philistine assumptions.
 

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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