Angling for immortality

"Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime," the aphorism says. No one has exemplified this more than Czech writer Ota Pavel. 

Pavel (1930-73) has been unfortunately neglected in English, but the recent publication of his memoir How I Came to Know Fish will hopefully remedy that. A humorous and affecting depiction of the author's childhood in the Bohemian countryside, How I Came to Know Fish illuminates the beginnings of Pavel's lifelong love affair with fishing through a lens that is instantly identifiable as Czech: Each of these tales is packed with water sprites, trips to the weekend cottage, mushroom picking, potato pancakes and, of course, carp. 

The book's true star is not Pavel, however, but his father. Resourceful and endlessly optimistic, Ota's Papa is a schemer with an eye for the ladies as well as a talent for selling new-fangled fridges, even to villagers who don't have electricity. Much of the book's comedy - and its poignancy - comes from Papa's exploits.

Deciding to combine a flair for business with his passion for angling, Papa invests in a pond apparently stocked with prize carp. Once the pond is drained, however, it becomes clear he has been fooled: The body of water contains only one, albeit enormous, fish.

Papa avenges this humiliation by selling the pond's previous owner, Dr. Vaclavik, an apparently top-of-the-line Electrolux fridge that, on closer inspection, turns out to be junk. As Pavel writes in the chapter's closing lines, "Vaclavik had bought the most expensive rabbit hutch, not only in Bohemia, but in the whole of Central Europe."

More comic still is Papa's obsessive pursuit of his boss's wife, the alluring, unattainable Mrs. Irma. Papa desperately tries to convince the most famous avant-garde artist of the day, Vratislav Nechleba, to paint Mrs. Irma's portrait, a gesture Papa hopes will satisfy the vanity of the firm's general director while earning himself a place in the woman's heart. But when the artist is presented with the buxom blonde in snakeskin high heels, he exclaims, "I won't paint this broad! Not at any price!"

Only Papa's status as master salesman prevents him from being fired, although he does at least get to hold the distraught Mrs. Irma in his arms for a moment.  

As the title suggests, fishing is a constant touchstone throughout this diverse collection of tales. Once the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia begins, fishing becomes both an act of defiance and means of survival. In one of the book's most moving scenes, Pavel's father risks his life to steal back a confiscated carp the night before he is deported to a concentration camp. Left alone to take care of his mother, the young Pavel quickly turns poacher too. In this way, the writer's love of angling saves his life not once, but twice.

While in Austria covering the 1964 Winter Olympics as a sports journalist, Pavel suffered a severe psychological breakdown. As a result, he was hospitalized for five years, a period during which he began composing his memoir.

How I Came to Know Fish was born not of a creative burst of insanity, however, but rather the struggle to regain mental clarity. Explaining his reasons for writing his memoir in the book's final paragraph, Pavel says, "I wanted to kill myself a hundred times when I felt I couldn't go on but I never did. [?] Fishing taught me patience, and my memories helped me go on."

The fact that a publishing giant like Penguin has launched a series focused on writers from Central Europe is laudable and welcomed. But the press release accompanying a review copy of How I Came to Know Fish seems at pains to stress how the region "has suffered hideously throughout much of the 20th century" and has been "invaded, despoiled and mutilated in a way which it is hard for outsiders to appreciate."

No one would disagree that the people of Central Europe have undergone enormous suffering over the course of the 20th century. Nevertheless, to claim that we should read a book simply because its author hails from "an oppressed, violated or ruined culture" is misguided. Despite the hardships they undergo, the Czechs in Pavel's book are not victims, but survivors. Pavel's skill as a writer allows him to broach subject matter that is deadly serious without succumbing to mawkishness or misery.

Readers should not pick up a copy of How I Came to Know Fish to support the underdog. They should do so because Pavel was a gifted storyteller.

Lisette Allen can be reached at
features@praguepost.com