2024-08-24 15:35:30
Fifty-seven-year-old Marek Toman has already written several novels, mainly with historical themes. The most recent one, called České sklo, however, devoted itself to the current topic, and also situated it in the environment of Czech diplomacy, in which he has been active as an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for several decades.
The anti-hero of the prose published by the Akropolis publishing house is a charming witty opportunist: the Czech ambassador to Estonia. He used to be able to move smoothly from one mode to another, because he knows all tricks, and above all, human nature. Now a colleague becomes his victim: young diplomat Michal Tyrš, a man “fragile as glass”, as his superior likes to call him.
The combination of diplomacy and beautiful literature is not so unique. The Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Czesław Miłosz, worked as a cultural attaché in the USA and Paris, the Mexican laureate of the same award, Octavio Paz, also had a diplomatic career. Just as there were novelists working in the secret service, for example John le Carré or Graham Greene. Like him or among Czech authors, for example Egon Hostovský, Marek Toman can accurately describe the formalistic and hierarchical absurdities with Kafkaesque features that occur in a similar environment and with which one has to deal, unless one is fragile like glass.
The novel takes place after a tragic death in Tallinn, Estonia. It is told in the form of the ambassador’s monologue addressed to a psychologist, whose answers we only read indirectly.
We follow the story from the moment when the ambassador’s deputy Tyrš goes on a foreign mission with his wife and three children for the first time. However, the book does not only deal with the various pitfalls in the life of a respectable but unsophisticated diplomat. It is also an accurate probe into the latent Czech Russophilism and its roots.
The author, who has not yet reflected much on the present, was interested in the topic. All the more so because when he previously drew attention to that susceptibility to Russian interests, people did not pay attention to him.
The author of the book, Marek Toman, has been working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1997. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba
“Until Russia’s attack on Ukraine, nobody was very interested in these official-diplomatic observations of mine. It was as if they were from another world,” says Toman, who worked in Tallinn, among other places.
He said he often heard that if the Russians took Crimea, maybe it really belonged to them somehow. Or that Vladimir Putin doesn’t really mean what he says. “While I had completely different experiences with Russian thinking and actions in the world of diplomacy. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a strong impulse for me to write about these things,” he adds.
In the book, he probably quite accurately portrays the atmosphere at the small Czech embassy in Estonia, which we get to know together with how Tyrš’s family settles there.
But the character of the irresistable, crackingly funny, seasoned ambassador will stick with the reader the most. He is a classic alpha male in his prime and in power. He managed a brilliant career under both the previous and current regimes, as well as the exchange of the somewhat “outdated” wife Hanička one for Hanička two, and even an offer of physical intimacy to the young wife of his subordinate.
The only thing this man doesn’t understand is the times, which are changing after all, even if people like him don’t admit it.
Cover of the novel České sklo. | Photo: Akropolis publishing house
According to their experience, all regimes play by the same, opportunistic rules of power. And if the ambassador offers a woman his arms, it is an absolute misunderstanding of the chance of a lifetime if she rejects him, which happens in the book. “And what did she achieve? With the criminal complaint against me and the ministry? She can’t get a job and those bastards of hers go to some lice-infested base in Jižák. Goose. This is how you trample on your luck,” the ambassador scolds.
But he is not only overly interested in women, he is also a big Russophile. “It may be that we belong to the family of Western democracies, that we are in the same boat in terms of values. But what about emotionally? We should not forget that we are Slavs,” he argues.
Czech authors do not delve into current topics that often. Marek Toman, who has already set the historical novel Chvála opportunismu, which deals with the death of Jan Masaryk, among other things, in the environment of diplomacy, managed it with wit and perspective, even though the dramatic conclusion is slightly chilling. Even what might have seemed a little far-fetched to someone five years ago, unfortunately does not look absurd after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As a warning against people in whom the Western lifestyle, education or values cause anxiety about their own inferiority rather than inspiration, České sklo is not only current, but also universal.
Video: We carry a bit of a myth that someone bigger always overpowers us, says historian Stehlík about August 1968
“We wanted almost democracy and the Russian spoiled it all for us. This is a myth, it was a dispute between the communist parties,” historian Michal Stehlík says in the program Spotlight. | Video: Team Spotlight