This Side of Reality: Modern Czech Writing.

Schubert, Peter Z.

According to recent criticism, modern Czech prose is wasting away. Booksellers offer their potential customers classics or semiclassics, and if new original prose is published at all, it is done marginally and in small editions. Nevertheless, Alexandra Buchler managed to find no fewer than seventeen examples of such writing (ten short texts and seven excerpts from longer prose works) for her anthology This Side of Reality. A closer examination somewhat depreciates this achievement, however, as it reveals that "modern Czech prose" in Buchler's perception covers the entire postwar period. Only eight of the works included in the volume date from the 1990s, with the two most recent selections bearing the date of 1994; others go as far back as the 1950s. Similarly, while the time described in the narratives extends from 1939 to the present, only one selection is set in the 1990s, and the period most frequently presented here is the 1950s. The gallery of authors ranges from Bohumil Hrabal (b. 1914), the eldest, to the pseudonymous Ewald Murrer (b. 1964), the youngest, and includes six exiles. It is a very representative selection, although, given the scale of the collection, the name of Milan Kundera could certainly have been included.

The editor adds to the "historical quality" of Modern Czech Writing, as she explains in her two-page introduction that these writers have been "united in their implicit or explicit rejection of formal and ideological dogmatism, and also in their genuine concern for the continuity and integrity of national culture and for essential human values crushed in an atmosphere of fear, apathy and general complicity." She further observes that they "draw on a legacy of irony and humor and on the tradition of the absurd and the surreal, that they often abandon the conventions of literary realism in favor of collage, fragmented and episodic narrative through which they examine the continuously distorted image of the past and present, explore the ever-shifting line between imagination and reality, and test the communicative capacities of language corrupted by the hegemony of ideology." In other words, she correctly identifies the prose characteristic for the country as that on the boundary between dream and reality, pseudomysterious and mystical (Kafka has always been the great mentor here) - given, of course, that the text is not broken into mere incoherent fragments. It still is (post)"modern" here to engage in hermetism.

The title This Side of Reality certainly captures the spirit of the collection well and would be difficult to improve upon. In addition to the prose selections and the aforementioned introduction, the anthology contains six pages of notes "About the Authors" and one-and-a-half pages of copyright permissions arranged in alphabetical order. This seems to emphasize the mystery of the organization of the individual titles. Neither the introduction nor the notes explain the order of the selections. Moreover, the dates attributed to the works do not refer to the original appearance of the texts, Buchler explains - "It is difficult to date them without a degree of confusion" - but rather to their "first traceable publication." This self-assumed - and unnecessary - poetic license makes it even more difficult to keep the writings in temporal perspective.

There also seems to be some confusion with regard to the references given in the list of permissions and to the translations used in the book. The works were rendered into English by a total of nine translators (with Buchler being the most prolific among them, as she translated four of the selections), and the quality of their work varies. Despite the inconsistent level of translation, however, and the want of a better use of dates, This Side of Reality is an interesting anthology that covers Czech letters of the last four decades and presents both well-established and new authors. Similarly, while some of the selections may have gained a certain notoriety already, the texts by the younger authors are only now becoming popular and are virtually unknown to the English-language reader.

Peter Z. Schubert University of Alberta