Writers' Festival: Czech novelist combines fantastic and mundane

Czech writer Michal Ajvaz is difficult to categorize.

"I'm a Czech novelist, a Polish poet and an American science fiction writer," he declared over coffee at the Prague Writers' Festival, joking about the varied international reception of his work.

But Ajvaz is eloquent when describing the method behind his imaginary novels, which combine fantastic events and reality, grounding philosophical concepts in specific settings such as Prague. In his 1993 novel The Other City, for example, Ajvaz's narrator discovers that the statues on Charles Bridge house baby elk, which are fed every morning by a city worker.

Ajvaz's delightful combinations of reality and fantasy have earned him comparisons with Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges, and magical realist writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"Finding mystery in mysterious places or things is rather cheap. What I try to do is find mystery in everyday things," he said. "I like to mix genres which are absolutely unconnected - like philosophy and fairy tales. There's a kind of unity in different genres. Perhaps not a unity of ideas, but a unity of tone and melody."

But Ajvaz is outspoken about the limitations of literary labeling, calling comparisons to Borges and Marquez "exaggerations."

"I also have the reputation of being a postmodernist, which I think is inappropriate. Postmodern authors try to show that it is impossible to capture the plurality of different discourses. I'm trying to show that, even in plurality, there is a one basic or essential tone," he said.

Ajvaz published his first book, a collection of poems titled Murder in the Hotel Intercontinental, one week before the Velvet Revolution. Asked whether those historic events influenced his early writing, Ajvaz said he has always been more concerned with remaining true to his inner world, rather than reflecting the political world, even in the charged atmosphere of 1989.

"For me, writing never meant opposing or reacting to something. I was always willing to create my own imaginative world. Kafka is a good example of a very introverted author who wrote imaginative prose and at the same time said something very accurate about the political reality of the 20th century," he said.

The Empty Streets, a novel Ajvaz published in 2005, won the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for Literary Achievement, the most prestigious literary award in the Czech Republic. Despite such mainstream success, Ajvaz's style of multigenre amalgamation remains distinctly contrary to many peoples' ideas of what writing should be. It is fitting, then, that Ajvaz took part in this year's Writers' Festival, which was based in part on the theme of rebellion.

Insisting that "going against the stereotypes of viewing the world is the essence of any work of art, and is the authentic form of rebellion," Ajvaz aligns himself with the philosophy of phenomenology, established by German philosopher Edmund Husserl and undertaken by legendary Czech philosopher and Charta 77 spokesman Jan Patočka.

Ajvaz attended some of Patočka's lectures at Charles University in 1968 and does not deny the importance of philosophy in his books. However, he insists that the intersection of literature and philosophy is tenuous at best.

"The starting point of my books isn't philosophical ideas, but impressions. One day I was walking around the suburbs of Prague. It was in August, and the day was very hot. There was no one around, not a single person. The light was special, the way it was shining on the buildings, and I thought, 'This would be a good starting scene for a novel.' Five-hundred pages later, I had Empty Streets," he said.

Despite his current position at Prague's Center for Theoretical Studies, and his extensive writings on French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, Ajvaz says his primary responsibility is to write good fiction, not philosophy.

"Paul Valéry said, 'Out of great ideas come bad poems.' And I think that applies to novels as well."

- Filip Šenk contributed to this report.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com