2024-07-13 14:15:09
Michal Ajvaz is an important Czech writer and as such he was invited to an important book fair in Leipzig: a city full of elegant and enticingly mysterious passages. These serve as a beautiful, narrative backdrop for the tangle of slow- and fast-flowing stories layered in the author’s new novel, simply titled Passages.
However, the passages are anything but simple. The reader and the author, in the spirit of Umberto Eco’s theory, have to make a kind of imaginary agreement: to accept the narrative style and believe in the things, coincidences or paths that the writer takes. Michal Ajvaz, the seventy-four-year-old winner of the State Prize for Literature, will repay him for this trust with a narrative that surprises on every page.
Surprises combined with mystery and astonishment are the main currency of his writing. One cannot in the least expect to guess what will happen on the next page. Even if it does, it will happen again or completely differently. The novelist will present the book next Thursday, July 18, at the Goose on a String Theater in Brno and the following day at the Ostrava cultural center Provoz. Both events take place as part of the Author’s Reading Month festival.
Michal Ajvaz, as in his earlier books Mesta or Luxemburgská zahrada, also conveys his reflections on the essence of art – especially writing and painting – through stories, or rather stories within stories. But it also touches on current topics related to the essence of humanity. Specifically, the fear that machines or artificial intelligence will take over what is considered the most intrinsic to humans: storytelling.
The central motif of the prose is a mysterious, perhaps lost and perhaps not, painting by the real Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, who influenced the Surrealists and whose metaphysical or dream scenes intertwine in all corners of Ajvaz’s narrative. It is the ideas of the Dadaists and Surrealists about the role played by chance or the subconscious in the creation of a work of art that are pivotal in the entire construction of Passages.
The novelist also touches on the topic of authorship of works, the role of pride and modesty of creators or different approaches to the creative process. As always, gentle, unobtrusive humor is always present, with which even the deepest and most complicated thoughts can be relegated to the appropriate limits of absurdity.
Michal Ajvaz won the State Prize for Literature in 2020. | Photo: Publishing house Dré mesto
That is also why the stories in Passages are incredibly believable, and thanks to Ajvaz’s exceptional sense of humor, we completely believe and clearly see the American tabloid journalist sitting in the hollow of the statue of the then young Englishman Henry Moore.
The journalist has been trying unsuccessfully for a long time to write his own text, inspired by French literature. An absurd situation will help him: he has to deliver an impossible report about a mysterious actress. He ventures to her property, but dogs and bodyguards begin to chase him there. Finally, he finds refuge at the top of the statue, in a small stone hollow, where he spends the next eight hours undisturbed inventing his novel. “He feels as if the pleasant timelessness he has so unexpectedly been given does not belong in his life at all, as if it were a lucky break.”
Ajvaz himself appears in the book. After the bustle and events at the famous fair, he wanders through Leipzig’s arcades, whereupon he sees a key scene in a kind of softly snowy timeless world, in which unknown men hand over mysterious white boxes.
Mysterious objects, the setting of arcades, cafes, foreign cities and coincidences that lead to other coincidences, these are all ingredients that the writer masterfully uses to lead the reader to think about the essence and meaning of art in our lives. And also about the basics of human communication, understanding others or the ability to listen to stories that someone other than us has experienced.
The book itself, with 449 pages, is an invitation to experience that fertile timelessness. One can wander long enough through the passages of Ajvaz’s mind and view the showcases of different layers of narrative. To stop by them and refine your thoughts on the reflections of what you find here. It just needs time. Undisturbed concentration on the text, which in turn endows him with a sense of wonder and delight at the possibilities of fantasy, at so many mysteries that one can unravel together with the author, or at least participate in that process.
This novelist, so exceptionally profound and at the same time readable in Czech literature, proves that stories and their telling through books are also an act of courage. Courage to create a magnificent and fragile structure that can fall apart in the absence of that timeless.
Michal Ajvaz’s books are proof that in today’s fragmented attention span, reading is one of the few cures for the anxiety stemming from this condition. Surrendering to five hundred pages of a riveting stream of novelistic narrative, digressions, notes, images and words emerging from them has an incredibly liberating effect.
It’s a journey from everything short, quick and instant – social media posts, screams, sketchy videos – to something we often think we can’t afford anymore. All you have to do is let yourself get lost in the Passages on an almost winter evening.
Michal Ajvaz: Passages
Publishing House Druhé město 2024, 449 pages, 499 crowns