Marian Palla
(1953)
Novelist, poet, playwright, musician, visual artist and performer, winner of the first national round in Slam Poetry (2003)
Multiple artistic talent, very popular figure on smaller stages in particular. He issues from the best tradition of black humour, Dada and the nonsense-style poetry of such geniuses as Christian Morgenstern, Ernst Jandl and Hugo Ball.
The author loves to play wonderful games with everyday absurdities – the result is something close to a verbal happening.
Selected bibliography:
S chloupkem na jazyku aneb Sto případů detektiva Wlapra (With a Hair on One´s Tongue or the Hundred Cases of Detective Wlapr, short stories, 1999)
The hero of the hundred bizarrely solved cases is a middle-aged bachelor, Detective Wlapr, who is something like a Czech version of Colombo wrapped in the universal sheets of Palla’s fantasy. Some of the stories have the character of anecdotes, others are ingeniously worked comic-book-like short stories. Most of the cases are given their unity by Palla’s own illustrations in his typically infantile hand.
Review:
“Palla can write spontaneously, simply and to comic effect, without any useless intellectual cramps and stupid beer-drinkers’ vulgarities. The book is delicious fun – really. (...) Palla bets on the ancient and humble asceticism and formal strictness of humorists, which proves to be a highly successful inspiration.”
(Dora Kaprálová, iPort)
Zápisky uklízečky Maud' (Maud the Cleaner’s Diary, novel, 2000)
The name of th e Diary immediately puts one in mind of the many works of prose written in the form of a diary, but surprisingly, it is nothing like one of these. The reader will encounter the era of the Wild West, the occupation of the Earth by rats, the early Middle Ages, castaways, civil wars in Africa, the seeking and finding of gold with the aid of rotten apples, and other absurdities. Illustrated with the author’s own drawings.
Review:
“Marian Palla unleashes his peculiar sense of humour again, but it would be an oversimplication to mark his book as naive literature. The author is well acquainted with the methods of post-modernist literature (the crossing of levels of plot, authorial interference) and knows how to play with them. In the middle of a silly joke you can often find a sentence that sends shivers down your spine: “Czechs are fantastically tough, they can live anywhere within reach of a TV signal.”
(Jakub Grombíř, Tvar)
Vybrané kousky z Mariana Pally (Selected Bits of Marian Palla, 2001 – second and updated edition of earlier works Jak zalichotit tlusté ženě - How to Flatter a Fat Woman, collection of poems, first edition 1996, and Kdyby byl krtek velkej jako prase - If a Mole Were as Big as a Pig, short stories, first edition 1997, in one volume)
This book can be read from one or the other direction; in the middle we find two lists of contents and two colophons. By a simple act of obversion we can drift easily from poetry into prose and vice versa while still remaining in the magical world of Marian Palla, where so-called natural circumstances appear to be utterly extraterrestrial and the totally unimaginable turns out to be one of the most common things in life.
Review:
“…the best pieces in this book are as funny as Woody Allen’s good short stories.“
(Josef Chuchma, MF Dnes)
“…the obvious primitive style (of the author’s illustrations) reminds one of the creations of Kurt Vonnegut jr., from his well-known Breakfast of Champions.“
(Richard Svoboda, MF Dnes)
Zameť mou hruď (Sweep my Chest, novel, 2003)
In his new book, Marian Palla tells the most peculiar stories about a king and his wife, Josef the servant, and Mrs. Mrázková the cleaner. The stories are organised alphabetically and are also supplemented by funny dictionary-like entries that are dispersed throughout the text and help to explain the meaning of a story or serve to comment on it. Everything thus gains a special “scientific” quality that adds a new dimension to the typical style of this writer. Illustrated with the author’s own drawings.
International presentations:
Tombées de la nuit (Twilight of the Day Festival), Rennes, France (2002); Poetic Spring Festival, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2005
Notes:
Excerpts from Palla’s work have been translated into French (by Frédéric Bégue, Petr Dytrt, Sylvain Tanquerel), Hungarian (by Krisztián Benyovszky), Croatian (by Dubravka Sesar), Polish (by Dariusz Tkaczewski) and German (by Mirko Kraetsch). Manuscripts of the translations are available upon request from the Petrov publishing house.
Jak zalichotit tlusté ženě / How to Flatter a Fat Woman
Kdyby byl krtek velkej jako prase / If a Mole Was as Big as a Pig
S chloupkem na jazyku aneb Sto případů detektiva Wlapra /With a Hair on the Tongue or A Hundred Cases of Detective Wlapr
Zápisky uklízečky Maud' / The Notes of Maud', the Cleaning Lady
Selected pieces from Marian Palla's – Kdyby byl krtek velkej jako prase, Jak zalichotit tlusté ženě / If a Mole Was as Big as a Pig, How to Flatter a Fat Woman
Zameť mou hruď / Sweep my Chest
