Ivan Kl铆ma (born 14 September 1931, Prague, born as Ivan Kauders) is a Czech novelist and playwright. He has received the Magnesia Litera Award and the Franz Kafka Prize, among other honors.
Kl铆ma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement. He had been unaware that both his parents had Jewish ancestry; neither were observant Jews, but this was immaterial to the Germans. In November 1941, first his father Vil茅m Kl铆ma, and then in December, he and his mother and brother were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Theriesenstadt (Terez铆n), where he was to remain until liberation by the Russian Liberation Army in May, 1945. Both he and his parents survived incarceration鈥攁 miracle at that time鈥擳erez铆n was a holding camp for Jews from central and southern Europe, and was regularly cleared of its overcrowded population by transports to "the East", death camps such as Auschwitz. Kl铆ma has written graphically of this period in articles in the UK literary magazine, Granta, particularly A Childhood in Terezin. It was while living in these extreme conditions that he says he first experienced 鈥渢he liberating power that writing can give鈥�, after reading a school essay to his class. He was also in the midst of a story-telling community, pressed together under remarkable circumstances where death was ever-present. Children were quartered with their mothers, where he was exposed to a rich verbal culture of song and anecdote. This remarkable and unusual background was not the end of the Kl铆ma's introduction to the great historical forces that shaped mid-century Europe. With liberation came the rise of the Czech Communist regime, and the replacement of Nazi tyranny with proxy Soviet control of the inter-war Czech democratic experiment. Klima became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.[4] Later, his childhood hopes of fairy tale triumphs of good over evil became an adult awareness that it was often 鈥渘ot the forces of good and evil that do battle with each other, but merely two different evils, in competition for the control of the world鈥�. The early show trials and murders of those who opposed the new regime had already begun, and Kl铆ma's father was again imprisoned, this time by his own countrymen. It is this dark background that is the crucible out of which Kl铆ma's written material was shaped: the knowledge of the depths of human cruelty, along with a private need for personal integrity, the struggle of the individual to keep whatever personal values the totalitarian regimes he lived under were attempting to obliterate. For his writing abilities, Ivan Kl铆ma was awarded Franz Kafka Prize in 2002 as a second recipient. His two-volume memoir Moje 拧铆len茅 stolet铆 ("My Crazy Century") won the Czech literary prize, the Magnesia Litera, in the non-fiction category in 2010.
Ani Svat铆, Ani And臎l茅 = No Saints or Angels, c1999, Ivan Kl铆ma
Kristyna, a dentist, lives in Prague with her unruly teenage daughter, Jana. Born on one of the most momentous days of the last century - the day Stalin died - Kristyna's life seems full of uncertainties.
Stories of the death of her grandmother and aunt; memories of her difficult relationship with her late father, a member of the Communist Party's feared Peoples Militia; and strange, threatening letters from an anonymous correspondent all serve to compound her sense of unease. During the summer of 1998 she embarks on a relationship with Jan, a thirty-year old former student of her ex-husband's. Jan's father, a scout-leader, was persecuted by the Communists during the 1950's; his son is now employed by the government to investigate the crimes of the post-war regime.
However, not all are happy with his department's discoveries and they come under growing pressure from the government to disband. Meanwhile, Jana's increasingly erratic behavior betrays her growing addiction to drugs and her mother is forced to take drastic action in an attempt to change the course of her life.
Life is tough. Here is a woman, a divorced dentist, who blames herself for the dissolution of her marriage, even though her ex-husband cheated on her. Now her ex- is dying from cancer and she still feels responsible to go to his flat to care for him.
Her father has recently died and she is helping her mother through that crisis. She learns she has a half-brother, the result of her tyrannical father鈥檚 philandering, and this half-brother is sending her threatening letters.
As if that is not enough to deal with, her teen-aged daughter is on drugs. At first it was just a suspicion and then came the full-blown lying and stealing and now she's headed for re-hab.
While all this is going on, our heroine has a much younger man interested in her. But she can鈥檛 let the relationship develop because she can鈥檛 get past worrying about when he will leave her. She is good at self-sabotage.
This passage on her weariness illustrates the tone of this book: 鈥淚t was as if all the burdens I鈥檇 ever borne, all the disappointments I鈥檇 suffered, all the wine I鈥檇 ever drunk, all the cigarettes I鈥檇 ever smoked and all the sleepless nights all fused together.鈥�
The book, translated from Czech, holds political themes as well: both her ex-husband and her new lover work in archives supposedly dedicated to uncovering informers in the country鈥檚 communist past. Her grandmother died in a German concentration camp.
If you see issues you鈥檙e dealing with in this summary, you might want to read this book. It鈥檚 powerful, attention-grabbing and well-written. In part it鈥檚 a practical manual about dealing with a kid on drugs. There is always hope.
The author (b. 1931) is a prolific writer who has published more than 40 novels and short story collections. He鈥檚 also a playwright. It looks like more than half of his works have been translated into English.
Photo of Prague street scene in the 1990s from vintag.es The author from britannica.com