He affirms that her life could be equated with that of the Czech writer Bozena Némcová. The same could be said of his work: by ambition, depth and experimentation. RADKA DENENMARKOVÁ (KUTNÁ TIMA, Czech Republic, 57 years) does not quote in vain the author of The grandmother (1855), the first Czech novel of true artistic value – he preceded Kafka – because Němcová is one of the characters that appear in his last book, Chocolate blood, Just published in Spanish by Galaxia Gutenberg, with translation by Juan Pablo Bertazza. Also because the origin and task of his writing is the same as that of Němcová, although in another time and from another place. “From the global village,” DenenMarková, a good friend of the Polish Prize Olga Tokarczuk, who considers his prose “a magical mirror that shows both the visible and hidden.”
A good example is his latest novel, of which he is probably talked for long and laid next year, since the Czech Republic is the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair, from October 15 to 19, perfect showcase for the race for the Nobel, which in his case would settle infinity of pending debts. The chocolate blood of the title, the oil, the ink, the dark blood of the disinherited, of the marginalized, of those not chosen, travels a novel that takes place on an endless trip by train. The narrative advances with micrescens that follow each other rhythmically, uploaded to the infinite wagons of a peculiar locomotive that puts order, dissects and machaces majestically everything that drowns the present, starting with turocapitalism and the dangerous behavior of the oligarchs that today, more than ever, govern.
How do you do it? Gathering in that ghostly narrative train to the American tycoon John D. Rockefeller and his collection of perfect pillows, his best friends, to whom he consults everything and never respond; George Sand, the writer who won the respect of the men smoking in a pipe and trying to pass through one of them – but did it really win it? -, and the aforementioned Bozena Némcová, who started from the worst possible situations: not only was she a woman, but was of humble origin and was born in a country (the Czech Republic today, then the kingdom of Bohemia and Moravia, part of Bohemian and Moravia Austrohungaro) whom no one looked still, literally speaking and in many other senses. From these three figures, which happen and wrapped – a microescena gives way to another and the three seem to travel in the same compartment, even more than in different times – it is proven how “the crooked beam” of the human being, as Ursula K. Le Guin said, he cannot not be.
Because the problems are always the same. And they have to do with power, lack of empathy and false constructs that move away people from what they have in common to obey interests that are only a few. “The only thing that changes is the stage, the actors interpret the same papers,” says the author. Uncomfortable writer, despite her infinite nominations for prestigious awards, DenenMarková is still the best saved secret of Czech literature and, by extension, also European.
In a meeting with El País during a visit to Barcelona in September, Denenmarkavá got excited talking about his father. “I discovered, when he died, that I had saved in a box all my stories. Those who had written as a child. He always believed in me,” he recalled. In his novels, always criticism of the inevitable situation of each character and the injustice of birth where and how it is born, the context is destiny. “My context was my father. My humble origin and his status as a reader. Let me let me choose my own way as a child,” he adds.
He does not know where ideas come from because, he says, he does not distinguish “between life and literature.” He spent years traveling to China to compose the novel Lead hours And when he published it, in 2018, he was automatically vetoed in the Asian country. Next year, Galaxia Gutenberg will edit this novel in Spanish that, according to its editor, Nuria Cicero, “exposes something that nobody has yet exposed: the inexplicable ingenuity of Europe’s relationship with China.” It went from being an author admired and sold there to someone fearsome and, at the same time, powerful, since her book was a danger to the situation whenwhich is the same as saying for “totalitarianism” in China. In his opinion, Europe is “tolerating it in a childish and absurd way, without asking us why.”
Denenmarková is highly committed to what a gift considers. “When someone has talent for writing, they must write and follow their instinct, always go further, even if what you do is not understood at that time, because one day it will be very useful.” His novels are strange, including the famous Hitler’s money (Galexia Gutenberg, 2015). “For years, they haven’t known what they were,” he says. “I remember that my editor always said something similar to: ‘But what have you done this time? What exactly is this?’ And I said: ‘He trusts, it is something important.”
“Only now, recently, it has begun to understand it and respect me. The atmosphere in Prague has been very male and, at the same time, very little experimental. Obviously, I did not fit anywhere,” he says. Now he does. And at the same time he will never do it, in reality, because each of his novels is, as a character of Chocolate blooda kind of “living organism.” Something that takes shape as it is written.
Among his literary heroes are hundreds, but he cannot fail to mention Virginia Woolf, Dostoevski, Robert Musil. “Kafka? He hated him, and hated all the specialists in his work! They did not make us read anything else in the institute and in the university. Then I loved him, of course,” adds the novelist, also a translator and playwright, who understands literature as a revolution. The only one that has never stopped.