Jan Křesadlo - Mrchopěvci/GraveLarks (Maťa, Prague,1999)

Not many authors of fiction caution their readers in the narrative: ´...this book is somewhat disgusting in certain parts and this is about to happen now. If you wish you might easily skip this section with minimal damage to your understanding of the plot.....´. Jan Křesadlo does it twice in his masterpiece. In both cases what follows is a display of somewhat embarrassing behaviour of the main protagonists. Křesadlo´s honest and direct contact with his reader is one of the characteristic features of his writing. He wrote Mrchopěvci in Czech during his exile in England in the early 1980s and a doyen of the Czech literature Josef Škvorecký immediately snapped the manuscript up for his exile Czech and Slovak 68 Publishers in Toronto. It was a happy choice because Křesadlo received for Mrchopěvci the highly respected Egon Hostovský Prize in 1984, the same year in which the book came out.

Jan Křesadlo (the pen name for Václav Pinkava) was born in Prague in 1926 and died in Colchester a few months before his sixty-ninth birthday. In fiction he was a late starter, after a vexed as well as varied career in clinical psychology both in Prague and England. I knew him well as an enthusiastic leader of the London Sokol choir and I can say without hesitation that he was a man on the verge of genius in several fields. He had composed music and written essays in the field of logic as well as psychology long before he took up his pen or rather computer to try his luck in fiction. He was also an outstanding poet writing in Czech and classical Greek. Mrchopěvci is a partly biographical story set in Prague of the early 1950´s when Pinkava met his future wife in a church choir. Yet he would deny as he indeed did that he became a victim of politically motivated homosexual blackmail which is described in the book in some detail. The main protagonist, Zderad, is a gifted singer in a small male choir who sing at funerals - hence the title of the book. The behaviour of the individual members of the choir is selfish, materialistic and kafkaesque that when one of them (Tůma) dies, they could not care less where he was buried: ´.....what is certain that he couldn´t have afforded a funeral with singing and his life-long colleagues didn´t consider him worth losing the little money they could earn elsewhere at the time of this funeral....´.

The homosexual blackmail of which Zderad becomes a victim is the leitmotiv of the novel on which Křesadlo illustrates the essentially corrupting influence of Stalinism. It is often the case with the first work of a ´budding´ author that some themes become recurrent even in later works. Such theme in Mrchopěvci is sexual deviation which in fact was Václav Pinkava's specialisation in his field of clinical psychology. This theme reappears in several of Křesadlo´s dozen or so novels and books of short stories.

As a journalist but not a literary critic I can only declare my feelings about Křesadlo´s work and let others pass their professional judgement on it. I admire Mrchopěvci and his work in general immensely for its courage, honesty and mysticism, although I am well aware that Křesadlo has his detractors in print as well. When it comes to putting Křesadlo to some convenient artistic "box", or giving him some useful "label", then I can say that Křesadlo has been described as a "post-modernist" for instance by Karel Janovický, the Plzeň born musician and journalist living in London. Among other convenient labels is "neo-decadence" in the style of Ladislav Klíma. One thing is certain - whatever the "boxes" or "labels", Křesadlo is his own man which I believe could be shown as stemming from his virtual isolation in English exile at a time when he started writing fiction.

Mrchopěvci is the first of Křesadlo´s novels translated by his gifted family into English. The translation is superb, although I find the explanatory notes at the bottom of some pages often intrusive. It would probably be much better if they were placed at the end of the English version. The illustrations by Křesadlo´s Oscar-winning son Dr Jan Pinkava are superb. My favourite is a contour of Stalin´s face in the sky over the Žižkov mausoleum in Prague where the first Communist president Gottwald and one of the most dogmatic Stalinist leaders of all times was resting at the time of the story.

Křesadlo is a phenomenon which will survive many of us. And there can hardly be a better entry of his works into the new millennium than the English version of Mrchopěvci.