In your latest novel, "Pasáže", which you will soon be presenting at the Leipzig Book Fair, part of the story takes place in Leipzig's arcades. Why did you choose them as the setting? What attracted you to them?
Most of my novels began with an encounter with a place that I felt could be the setting for a story. That was also the case in Leipzig. When I walked through the place where three arcades met, I had the feeling that it was a place ready for two people to meet, approaching each other from opposite sides, while a third person watches them from another arcade, and that this initial situation could develop into the plot of a novel.
Your descriptions of the city are very detailed and accurate. Do they come from direct observation of specific places or from your imagination?
Sometimes I write about fictional cities, but if the story takes place in a real city, it is always a city I know from my own experience.
Do you already know where you will go next in your writing? Or is it too early to ask that question?
Currently, I am not writing fiction, but theoretical work. If I do get back to writing fiction, it is quite possible that it will again be based on an experience in a foreign city. Given that ninety-nine percent of all the cities I have visited were as a result of invitations to various readings, the starting point for my next book will probably depend on where I am invited.
Your novels are often classified as magical realism, philosophical novels, or fantasy. Which of these "labels" is closest to you? And how would you describe your work in your own words?
I don't think I need any such label, but if I had to choose, I would like surrealism the most. I feel a particular affinity with the work of Julien Gracq and André Pieyr de Mandiargues, without wanting to compare myself to these masters of writing in any way.
Your books are translated into German and published by Veronika Siska. How did this collaboration begin?
Veronika offered my books to various German publishers, but none of them wanted to publish them, so she decided to start her own publishing house. However, she also publishes books by other authors.
In an interview with Štěpán Kučera, you said that "every book is a statement about reality, even about historically determined reality." What statement about today's world are you trying to capture and convey in your books, consciously or unconsciously?
Images that are creations of the imagination and are not based on any predetermined idea express the experience from which they matured, and because that experience is an experience in a specific historical, social, and political environment, they also express that environment in a certain way. To do so, they do not need to be an explicit realistic image of it – the fruit of an apple tree is not a small apple tree, but an apple that does not resemble it at all. I think it is not difficult to find a level in the stories of my books that refers to the historical moment when the books were written, often even before these phenomena became truly relevant. For example, in the novel "Cesta na jih", the storyline, which takes place in the imaginary city of Parka, shows how falsehoods systematically spread in society for a certain hidden purpose can create an urgent fictional reality that has the power to radically change the life of a community; the South American episode in the same novel deals, among other things, with a dilemma that is particularly relevant today, namely the dilemma of deciding whether to join forces with allies who are not entirely righteous in the fight for a just cause, or to keep one's hands clean even at the cost of defeat; the story about a robot in "Pasáže" relates to the question of whether artificial intelligence will truly compete with the work of artists. The story of the Stone family in the novel "Města" concerns the historical transformation of technology 1.0 into technology 2.0, etc.
You have experienced several stages in the development of Czech literature. What do you think of the current one? Does it have anything to offer the world?
I think that a writer's job is not to offer something to the world, but to write as best they can about what is important to them.
What is important to you personally? What themes and values do you want to convey through your books?
I don't plan the themes of my novels in advance; they gradually reveal themselves as the novel takes shape. Through my books, I would like to convey above all the joy of reading.
Until 1994, you made a living doing various manual jobs – from hall worker at the Municipal House to night watchman and caretaker to water pump operator at Vodní zdroje. How did this experience influence what you write and how you write it?
I don't think it's particularly significant. A lot of my experiences from that time are reflected in my books, but I think that if I had done something else, different experiences would have been reflected in them.
You made your literary debut relatively late, in 1989, with the title "Vražda v hotelu Intercontinental". Did you write before that – perhaps for your own pleasure? And what made you decide to publish for the first time?
Although I tried my hand at writing in high school, I didn't really start writing until relatively late, sometime after I turned 35, in the mid-1980s. At that time, I was writing purely for myself, but in 1988, when I had written enough to fill a book, there was a certain relaxation in the culture, in a kind of imitation of Gorbachev's "perestroika," to such an extent that I decided to compile the texts into a book, put it in an envelope, and send it to a publisher. The book was published in the week when the "Velvet Revolution" began.
When I read the reviews, I noticed that your novels seem to some readers like one long, gradually unfolding story. Is this intentional, or rather a side effect of how you think about the world and characters? And if you are working on another novel, where would it fit into this "whole"?
As I said, my books begin with a feeling, often connected to a real place. Because nothing is planned in advance, the plot develops from this formless beginning, and in the course of writing, various archetypes come to the fore (such as the relationship between form and formlessness, or the relationship between the substance of a sign and its meaning), which are personal but also shaped by historical experience, and these then ensure the unity of all the books. As for the connections between the individual books, they are not planned; I only realize them once the book is finished. For example, I realized later that the books "Prázdné ulice", "Cesta na jih" and "Města" form a kind of trilogy about journeys, in which the plot concerns the past in the first case, the present in the second, and the future in the third.
In Germany, you have had several literary appearances in a relatively short period of time recently. How do you feel about performing in front of a German audience? And what has been the prevailing reaction to the book in Germany so far?
I like meeting readers because I often learn about interpretations of my books that I didn't think of when writing them, but which I find so good that I accept them as my own (in Bulgaria, for example, I learned that the book "Cesta na jih" deals with Georg Cantor's set theory). In Germany, I sensed curiosity about a previously unknown author, and I also had the feeling that the reception of the book reflected a weariness with the flood of autofiction and similar works. (When a writer is consistently conservative, there comes a time when he becomes an innovator.)
Photo: David Konečný
The interview with author Michal Ajvaz was conducted by Karolína Tomečková.