Kafka's The Trial; Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk; Kundera's The Joke; Bohumil Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age; Josef Škvorecký's Lieutenant Boruvka novels: one might be forgiven for thinking that all Czech literature is somehow synonymous with absurdism, dark humour and the erotic sublime. But this is too simplistic. Do Austen, Dickens and Larkin represent Eng lit? "I don't like it when people make generalisations about nations or ethnicities," writes the novelist Ivan Klíma in his new memoir, which covers his life from early childhood in Prague to the Velvet Revolution in 1989, "claiming that Germans are disciplined, Czechs have a sense of humour, the English are tight-laced, the Russians are drunkards, Jews are businessmen and Gypsies are thieves". Just as there is more to English literature than marriage plots, social panoramas and patiently lowered horizons, there is more to Czech literature than long jokes and the aesthetics of the forlorn. There is, for example, the work of Klíma.
With his once-fashionable shaggy Beatles haircut and his ever-serious and scholarly mien, Klíma looks well meaning and yet utterly out of touch – like a university professor. Yet Philip Roth once described Klíma as "my principal reality instructor". When Roth used to visit Prague during the early 70s, it was Klíma who would take him to meet the writers who were mopping floors and laying bricks and selling cigarettes. He wasn't trying to make a point: this was simply what life was like. As a writer, Klíma is more reporter than fantasist. He doesn't do fugues and complex counterpoints. He doesn't do picaresque. He observes and broods and then he writes it down. In English-speaking countries, his best‑known work is probably Love and Garbage (published in Czech in 1986 and in English translation in 1990), a book Roth accurately describes as The Unbearable Lightness of Being "turned inside out". For those who have never read his work, one might usefully think of Klíma as the opposite of Kundera: a writer who understates, and who stayed.
Klíma's memoir is called My Crazy Century. It's an appropriate title. "Sometimes it was funny crazy," he remarked in a recent interview. "But mostly it was crazy crazy." The two great crazies of the last century – and of Klíma's personal experience – were fascism and communism. He describes the "Communist movement" as "a criminal conspiracy against democracy". As for the Nazis, Klíma had no idea growing up that he was Jewish and therefore was shocked to discover that "I was so different from other people it might give them a pretext to kill me". He was in fact christened by his Jewish parents – "under the foolish illusion that they would be protecting … me from a lot of harassment". The harassment came anyway.
In 1941 Klíma was taken with his family to Terezín concentration camp. He was seven years old – so young, he says, that he "accepted whatever happened as an interesting change". Somehow, he survived. Asked in later years to rationalise or even justify his good fortune, he reflects: "It's a strange world when you are called upon to explain why you weren't murdered as a child." The only true explanation, he says, is that he had simply drawn a lucky number in "this abominable lottery".
His luck did not hold. Having survived one tragedy he and his family were plunged into another. "Whereas German rule over the Czech lands lasted six years, Communist suzerainty over Czech society lasted four decades." Klíma's father, scarred by his experiences in Terezín, became an enthusiastic communist, but was eventually arrested and imprisoned for "endangerment of the economic plan". Perhaps the saddest moment in this book is when his father, after his release from prison, attempts to have his party membership reinstated: a terrible scene of self-subjugation. Klíma recalls that when Jean-Paul Sartre visited Czechoslovakia, he told his audience that communism, "whether or not it had a future, was leaving its mark on an entire era. Perhaps it was a hell, but even hell could serve as a grand literary theme." For a useful idiot like Sartre, Klíma has the obvious answer: "Hell was indeed a wonderful theme, especially if you didn't have to live in it."
After leaving college Klíma started work as a journalist and then began publishing stories. He had two chances to leave Czechoslovakia. In 1968, when the Soviets invaded, he was visiting London – with a woman who was not his wife. He chose to go back home, and to his family. A year later, teaching at the University of Michigan, he was thoroughly enjoying himself: "I could say anything I wanted in public or in my lectures; I could go wherever I wanted, and if it was just a little frugal, I could acquire anything I wanted." But it felt wrong: "I couldn't rid myself of the feeling that the whole thing was inappropriate. I was enjoying freedom and prosperity I didn't deserve, whereas I was needed at home, where one had to somehow fight for everything." Again, he went back home to the fight.
On his return he was forced to accept jobs as a hospital orderly and a street sweeper – the experience that later became the basis for Love and Garbage. There were interrogations and humiliations and by the age of 40 he had written just one novel: it was only much later, in the 80s, when he was taken on by the agent Adam Bromberg, that Klíma's fortunes as a writer began to change. The crucial role of agents and publishers in determining the history of a writer's career – under communism or under capitalism – is a theme lurking in Klíma's book. How and why and where do they thrive? Could communism ever be conceived as a good thing for the artistic imagination? A diabolical thought, and yet Klíma admits that the Czech communist regime "succeeded in doing something that no democratic society ever could: it unified everyone who had been harmed or silenced, everyone who had refused to acquiesce to its demands".
This is a hard lesson, particularly for those of us who cleave to comforting notions of transhistorical literary genius, and justice and fairness. In certain circumstances, some writers thrive – and in the same circumstances, others fail and falter, or simply disappear. There are obviously dozens of Czech writers alone, from this century and the last – Petra Hůlová, Michal Ajvaz, Alexandr Kliment, Jan Trefulka – who remain little known to English-speaking readers. Bohumil Hrabal may be "the most remarkable Czech prose writer" of the 20th century, as Klíma puts it – he calls him "the prince of Czech literature" – but there are many other princelings and princesses.
The great Czech samizdat writer Ludvík Vaculík once complained that foreigners "judge the quality of Czech literary works exclusively by the degree to which it 'settles accounts with illusions about socialism' or by the acerbity with which it stands up to the regime here". Klíma has never been one for account-settling and acerbity and My Crazy Century is as interesting for its ruminative account of his emotional and personal turmoils as it is for its chronicling of postwar Czech history. Married to a psychotherapist, Helena, Klíma suggests a number of reasons for his numerous infidelities: "It was easy to persuade oneself that, at least in this area of life, one was not restricted any more than anywhere else in the world, perhaps even less." This is as close as he comes in the book to any kind of excuse or apology. The tone throughout is absolutely measured and balanced – until the end.
The book finishes – oddly, and yet appropriately – with a number of uncharacteristically ferocious essays, "Ideological Murderers", "Revolution – Terror and Fear", "Life in Subjugation", "Occupation, Collaboration, and Intellectual Riffraff". These essays, Klíma's farewell, will make uncomfortable reading for anyone who wields power, or who is attracted to ideologies that seek to impose their will by force. Klíma warns against "prophets of hope", against revolutionaries, religious fanatics, militant atheists, and all of the other "repulsive monsters" who continue to seek to dominate and exploit others. "Perhaps this attempt of mine to recount and analyse what took place in my life," he writes, "might have meaning even for those who consider communism a long-dead idea." Let's hope so.
