The belief in humanity of Ivan Klíma, who opens Cúirt today, gives his work a rare compassion, writes Eileen Battersby.
Literary gatherings tend to have a smash-and-grab feeling about them. So many writers, so many choices. This year's Cúirt International Festival of Literature, which opens in Galway today and runs until Sunday, should test the stamina of even the toughest - and greediest. Rather like being presented with a dozen splendid meals all at once, anyone intent on experiencing Cúirt will have to be organised and decisive.
Alistair MacLeod and Lorrie Moore represent North America; Ireland can call on two of its finest literary voices, Eugene McCabe and the most exciting of the younger writers, Sean O'Reilly, whose first two novels, Love And Sleep and The Swing Of Things, suggest that this is a major international talent. Much interest will also be directed at Neil Jordan's participation. Irish fiction's loss proved cinema's gain, but the return of Jordan to the fiction form with a new novel, Shade, is an event in itself.
Among the British writers participating is the former Booker Prize winner James Kelman and the essayist, novelist and memoirist Jan Morris, a Booker contender, who has written several classic travel books, including, most recently, Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere.
Admittedly, even a glance at the programme is akin to surveying a sweet-shop window, diverse and luscious and inviting. Yet if there is a unifying theme, aside from the business of writing itself, it is the powerful presence of the writers of Eastern Europe. This is where the organisers of Cúirt must be saluted, for providing a very important service to readers.
Just as the British publishers Harvill and Granta - as well as, more recently, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - have brought specialist international fiction in translation to our attention, Cúirt has invited outstanding poets such as the Estonian Jaan Kaplinski and a strong Hungarian trio headed by Ferenc Juhász, Mila Haugová and George Szirtes.
Juhász is the veteran here. His epic, The Boy Transformed Into A Stag, was inspired by the death of his father. It has been widely translated and anthologised. A lyric, autobiographical poet, he has never been particularly political.
It is on this point that any consideration of post-communist Eastern and Central European writing must now turn. The writers of protest, be they living in Eastern Europe, Latin America or South Africa, were compelled to make their art take up arms. The novel, the poem, the play became a weapon of subversion. This obligation created a dilemma that would became a debate: the good versus the important. Many writers were important, many were gifted, some were both. With the collapse of communism writers of protest were forced, as the Russian novelist Andrei Bitov remarked, "to look elsewhere, to look within ourselves". It has heralded a search for identity, for an assertion that is both personal and cultural.
One writer who succeeded in evoking the turmoil and atmosphere of life in his country while always exploring human dramas about relationships is Ivan Klíma, a native of Prague who has experienced war, spending the years from the age of 10 to 14 in a concentration camp, Terezín, or Teresienstadt. It introduced him to the reality of living with death. "The knowledge that you can be murdered tomorrow evokes a longing to live intensively; the knowledge that the person you are talking to can be murdered tomorrow." His appearance at Cúirt will be one of the festival highlights.
This is not his first visit to Ireland. Klíma, blessed with the old-world manners and natural grace of the Central European, has an established readership, yet his voice retains a freshness and honesty. He is one of God's optimists. For Klíma, Kafka, about whom he wrote an essay in 1982 - the piece of writing of which he is most proud - remains "the greatest". Most concerned with aspects of love, Klíma is a writer who, as he says, "places all importance on human fate, not politics". It is this essential belief in humanity that gives his fiction a compassion few writers are now capable of possessing. He understands moral confusions and is capable of questioning them and society while never appearing cynical or polemical.
The son of a Jewish father and a half-Jewish mother, he was born in 1931, writing his first story as a boy in the concentration camp. As a student of literature he was force-fed an official diet of socialist realism devoid of merit and rife with polemic. He began to read for himself, and began publishing in 1956. While working as the deputy editor of a radical and influential literary journal, Literarni Noviny, he began to attract official disapproval. The magazine had a wide circulation; its offices were watched.
As the Prague Spring dawned Klíma denounced censorship in an address at a writers' conference. He pointed out that life, and certainly censorship, had become worse than they had been under the shadows of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Although he has never seen himself as a radical or a dissident, his candour was viewed as dangerous. Banned for 20 years, his voice silenced and his rights as a writer denied, all that was left open to him was menial work, from hospital porter to street cleaner. These grim if at times comic experiences are recorded in My Golden Trades (1992). He was arrested, interrogated and held by the authorities, yet Klíma has never presented himself as a hero or martyr.
Aside from a year as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan he never left his troubled country. Milan Kundera not only left but also began writing in French, the language of his adoptive country. Josef Skvorecky headed for Canada and established a publishing house in Toronto. There has always been a touch of the literary showman about Kundera, a writer who has intellectualised sex and perfected the cynical shoulder shrugging that features in much East European, particularly Russian, writing. The affable Skvorecky achieved greatness in one unique book, The Engineer Of Human Souls (1977, translated 1984), but since then has favoured a more jocular realism.
Klíma is unlike them. A subtle honesty prevails in his work. The early books My Merry Mornings, My First Loves and A Summer Affair are gentle, even innocent, and certainly appealing. But with Love And Garbage Klíma indicated that his romanticism might be slightly more robust than at first suspected. It remains the novel that for him "expressed most entirely my metaphysical and personal problems, the ideas about the spirit, love and death". It is a novel alive with exasperated dialogue.
Not surprisingly, the narrator is trying to write an essay about Kafka while working part time as a road sweeper. He is also intent on sorting out his relationships with his wife, his mistress and himself. A novel of truths, it probably reveals more about Klíma than any of his other books. Likeable, yes, but not a naif.
The Spirit Of Prague (1994), his non-fiction collection, confirms that for all his kindliness Klíma possesses a tough, all-seeing, almost philosophical intellect. His critical writing is valuable because Klíma does more than celebrate: he interprets and identifies.
When writing the introduction for Prague Tales, a collection of short stories by Jan Neruda, a wonderful 19th-century Czech journalist and observer who shared something of the textured vision of the great Joseph Roth, Klíma not only placed Neruda in context but also explained the battle undertaken by Czech writers determined to reassert their lost language and the beleaguered Czech and Slovak traditions. After all, Kafka wrote in German, not Czech.
Klíma's big book, Judge On Trial, is the story of Adam Kindl, an intelligent, sympathetic character somewhat battered by life. Kindl is a judge; his private life is a mess: his wife is engaged in a fraught affair with a young student who believes that true love requires pain, he suspects his parents are going crazy and he is presented with an impossibly tricky murder case. Although his political record is clean, Kindl had dissident associations and so suspects that he is as much on trial as is the accused. The genius of the novel is in juxtaposing Kindl's private exploration of what he describes as "moral grandeur" with the cynicism of his colleagues.
It was initially published in a samizdat version in Prague in 1978. Klíma then reworked it, and it was republished in 1986. An English translation appeared in 1991. A persuasive, convincing book, it is part narrative, part meditation. Klíma is critical of the book, as he rewrote it so many times and knows the full chaos of its publishing history. But to the reader presented with this big, human novel, it is like being locked willingly into a room. The bewildered Kindl is a masterful and truthful portrait of a person's confusion. In order to understand himself he, like most of us, begins to reconsider his past.
It is the novel that established Klíma in the West, particularly the US. Waiting For The Dark, Waiting For The Light followed in an English translation in 1994, with The Ultimate Intimacy in 1997. Two years later Granta published Lovers For A Day, a collection that brought together early and more recent work. Life and love; personal chaos and regrets; the human condition dominated it. Politics for him is never the full story. "A real life may only exist through a relationship," he once told me. Many writers fail through trying to provide all the answers. Ivan Klíma has always respected the questions.
Ivan Klíma reads with Eugene McCabe and Ewa Lipska in Cúirt's opening event, at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, at 8.30 p.m. today
