Fading Czech Velvet (Page 2)

Since then the country's cultural climate has not been kind to Klima, or to writers of his ilk. Today he's lucky to sell several thousand copies of just about anything--and that's limited almost exclusively to Prague, Brno and the university town of Ostrava. "Nearly everyone was forced to read real literature after the revolution," he tells me, "because there wasn't much else available. There were no trash novels, no Harlequins." Now, the Czech bestseller list looks much like the bestseller crop in any other country, topped by lifestyle, nonfiction scandals and translated editions of Ed McBain, Jackie Collins and Stephen King.

Klima explains one of the gross misperceptions of the sudden celebration, and equally sudden collapse, of formerly banned authors in the Czech literary marketplace. Like many other writers who were proscribed in the Communist era, Klima is not explicitly political in the traditional sense. "Young critics knew we were banned, but they had not seen our work," he comments. "They thought we were writing like Solzhenitsyn. They wanted big heroes."

With the possible exception of Milan Kundera (who has, according to the popular view here, forfeited his "Czechness" by writing in French, from Paris), none of the most well-known banned writers had imbued their writing with the slightest bit of heroic grandeur. Czech fictional narratives are characteristically episodic and highly personal. Klima's fiction is concerned with such themes as the obsessions of love, the power of self-delusion, the unraveling of faith, the tragicomic moments as people attempt, and fail, to be bigger than they are. "The interests of the suppressed writer," Klima says in the preface to his collection of essays, The Spirit of Prague (1998), "far from focusing exclusively on political questions, were similar to the interests of most authors anywhere in the world."

The very human nature of Klima's work is precisely what makes it accessible, if not always lofty. His writing does not belong on the highest rungs of literary masterworks but in the realm of the vivid storyteller, the prober into human foibles. The structures of his stories are not complex--as they are in the novels of Bohumil Hrabal, for example--nor are the characters grandiose in any way. It is his eye, however, for individuals' means of coping with the tragedies and absurdities of political and social conditions--rendered in the background, or even in passing--that made Klima dangerous to the Communists, and today makes his writing resonate with the dramatic changes in the country over the nearly ten years since the revolution.

Klima's latest novel translated into English, The Ultimate Intimacy (1997), reflects many of those changes, as seen through the eyes of a Protestant minister, Daniel Vedra. Forced to practice in a small, isolated town during Communism, after the revolution he returns to Prague. He suddenly finds himself famous--via televised sermons he delivers weekly, with growing numbers of congregants visiting his church--and rich, after he sells a family house obtained through restitution. We catch up with him as his newfound wealth and fame lead him into the arms of temptation, via a mysterious woman who starts showing up at his services. The novel traces Daniel's decline as the fabric of faith and family life he carefully constructed unravels under the pressures of an extramarital affair.

In the process, Klima captures the sense of disillusionment that has followed the heady days of the Velvet Revolution. The novel is laced with the excesses and self-absorption of nouveau capitalism--increasing consumerism, drugs, sexual promiscuity, dissipation of family life and of what were once tight friendships dating from a time when all you had to trust (and not even then, sometimes) were a few close friends upon whom you could rely for support. But Klima is no puritanical moralist: Many of his books revolve around illicit or problematic sexual relations, or the ethical quandaries faced by people in particularly gray situations, whether personal or political.

The disillusionment evoked by Klima is a reflection of the mood of the country. The economy is in crisis; unemployment is rising; corruption is rampant; politicians have sunk quickly into petty maneuvering, virtually paralyzing the Social Democratic government. The ideals of the revolution are barely discernible--in either the political or literary culture. Even President Havel's public support is dwindling, as his eloquence is used against him; he is accused--by rival politicians and by commentators in the nation's press--of being out of touch with economic realities.

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