Petra Hůlová on The Long Version: “It’s not about my own story – it’s about my own experience of being used”
Czech author Petra Hůlová’s first novel, which came out when she was still in her early 20s, became a bestseller, and since then her works have been translated into over a dozen languages. Her latest title in English is The Long Version, translated by Hůlová’s regular collaborator Alex Zucker. Written from the perspective of a female author in her 50s, it explores themes of gender, potential abuse and intergenerational tensions.
What was the original spark for the whole idea of The Long Version? Or why did you want to write this book?
“Yeah… I never know what to answer to these questions [laughs].
“Always there are more things together. I think I’ve been interested in the topic of generational clash in my previous books too, so it’s something that is, like, permanent. And then sexuality, which I like to dig into too.
“I’ve already played with an auto-fictional quality in my book The Gorge, or Macocha, so I built on that too in The Long Version.
“Then there is the kind of #metoo moment of the relationship of the narrator, who is in her 50s, and the love of her youth – her relationship with an older author.
“That’s something I experienced myself and want to go back to – and, through the book, kind of process.
“I also worked with the topic of aging in my book Three Plastic Rooms.
“Maybe all these things came together: ageing, generational clash, sexuality, in terms of a woman in her 50s being invisible, and the narrator being a writer, like myself – so this kind of auto-fictional quality.”
You say you experienced in your life a similar relationship to the protagonist. In the book the protagonist’s daughter reads her diaries and finds out about her past – and she believes her mother was abused by a predator. The mother sees things rather differently. How do you view your own experience?
“I think the position of the narrator, the mother, who was in love with an older author when she was young kind of resembles my own attitude, which is – I would say – in between ‘nothing wrong happened’ and ‘you were abused.’
“And this quality of ambiguity is, I think, something inherent not only to myself and how I think about my own past and my life, but also to how I think about literature and my stories.
“So I didn’t want to prove someone’s guilt, or prove someone’s innocence.
“I just thought I had an interesting subject in my life that I might work with in my fiction, and think about it through a story, which is what I do when I write.
“So I did it and I think the result is not straightforward. It’s up to each reader to kind of figure out his or her own result, or understanding.”
In the book, the narrator was 17 when she had the relationship. What age were you?
“I didn’t want to prove someone’s guilt, or prove someone’s innocence.”
“I was older. But it’s not about my own story – it’s about my own experience of kind of being used and worked with. So I was older, yes.”
It’s naive, of course, to confuse the author with the narrator and to try to read a lot of autobiography into the character, Sylvia Novsk. But still I’m curious if there are attitudes that she has that you might also share, or what you might say to some of her attitudes. One thing she says is “Today’s high-tech young people are the most puritanical generation.” Do you believe that?
“I don’t know. I look for paradoxes, or interesting generational differences, and I remember that when I was young it seemed to be inherent to youth that the older generation would be like, Your morals are low and the way you young people live is kind of dirty.
“And I think with this generation it’s something different, and maybe it’s something different after decades – that the young generation is viewed by some as more puritan.
“I think it’s an interesting perspective and it might have something in it, so I work with that in the book.
“Maybe it’s something different after decades – that the young generation is viewed by some as more puritan.”
“But I think you can also argue against it.
“And what I think about it is not even interesting to myself [laughs].”
The book made me think about a lot of things. It was really food for thought for me. And one thing that came to my mind was that #metoo, which obviously had a big impact in the States and other places, never really made waves in this country, it seems to me. Is that something you would agree with?
“It’s difficult to say. I never really thought about it, probably.
“I always feel the urge to defend myself and to say that I think #metoo was very important and came with an important message, and all that – because then I start to be critical.
“But after the big enthusiasm for #metoo there also came a kind of disillusionment, or a recognition that maybe sometimes it was misused, or that not everything was true probably.
“I would say that here we maybe made a short-cut. We made it smaller from the very beginning and then avoided the disillusionment that came afterwards, which was constructive but also bad for the movement too.
“So maybe we kind of avoided it by not being so very enthusiastic about it.
“Does that make sense?”
Yes, but do you think there’s something in the nature of the Czech nation that means they are less inclined to follow such a trend as #metoo? Do you know what I mean?
“Yeah. I think – and again I’m just guessing and making it up right now – if we go further to the past, in communist times employment of women was high.
"[US feminists] were quite surprised to realise that all the women here work."
“From after the Second World War until, let’s say, the Velvet Revolution, in this ‘pre-era’ of our times, there wasn’t this straightforward division of roles that there was in the United States, with housewives and tough working guys.
“We never really had this here, because of communism and maybe other reasons. So, inherently, our path was different.
“I think when feminists came here after 1989 from the US to ‘educate’ local females in how to be emancipated, they were quite surprised to realise that all the women here work and all that – and in many ways they’ve been more emancipated than these feminists, or the background these US feminists came from.
“So there’s a different history, maybe, involved in all that.”
If I can digress for a second, I get the impression from comments that you have made that maybe you are sceptical about liberalism, or at least sceptical about a kind of liberal orthodoxy.
“I think I’m sceptical towards any orthodoxy, so definitely to the liberal one as well.
“And I don’t know what more to say, unless you ask me about something specific.”
For example, you defended people in this country who are afraid of migrants. You also said that women who are in war want peace above everything else, regardless of the conditions [in reference to Ukraine], which I know some people took offence to. Have you lost friends because of these positions?
“Well, I think there are people who don’t agree with me and I might have lost… I wouldn’t say friends, but definitely what you mentioned was received negatively.
“It didn’t do me any good among the circles I feel at home in, but not always with my opinions.”
On a much more neutral topic, you have worked with the translator Alex Zucker for over two decades. He did your debut novel All This Belongs to Me, and he’s won awards for his translations of your books. Could you describe your working relationship with him?
“This is definitely a much easier question [laughs].
“My working relationship with Alex is just fabulous. I trust him 100 percent and I only get great feedback on his translations.
“This is his fourth translation of one of my books. First, there was All This Belongs to Me, or Paměť Mojí Babičce, then Umělohmotný Třípokoj, Three Plastic Rooms, then Stručné Dějiny Hnutí, The Movement, and now The Long Version, Nejvyšší Karta.
“So I'm very grateful that I'm privileged to have such a great translator and I'm very happy about it.”
As he's working, does he sometimes consult with you and say there's some passage that he’s not really clear about? Or does he just give you the finished work that he's done, and then you respond?
“Alex sends me questions always after he finishes the translation, or sometimes also in the process of translation, and yes, usually it's about things that are unclear, or that offer different types of understanding.
“Sometimes it's only thanks to Alex's translation that I have to go back to my own work and realize that something does not fit, or might be misunderstood even by a Czech reader.
“In each translation there are situations like this, where Alex discovers something that I omitted as a writer because he has to understand everything he translates.
“Sometimes I write in this fervent rush and I don't question what I write. So thanks to him I have to do that later.”
In the book, the narrator is sceptical about international translations of Czech literature, saying that even when they're published sometimes they've essentially only been printed. What does it mean for you, though, to have your work coming out in other languages, as many of your books have done? I presume you have a more positive view of international translations than your protagonist?
“It really depends.
“There are different kinds of support for literature and some don't push the publishing house to do anything more with the book than just, you know, publish it; then publisher gets some money – and that’s enough. So no one sees the book in the language.
“That happened to me in the case of a Slovenian translation. I got this document about sales saying that six books were sold – I think it's a masterpiece to hide a book so well.
“But then there are different examples, such as Poland, the country of my heart, where I love to go and talk about my books.
“A lot of my books have been translated in Poland, and my translator is also my publisher there, Julia Różewicz. She is an admirable person and advocate of Czech literature, since her publishing house solely focuses on Czech literature.
“With foreign reviews it's interesting, because here it really is like a little pond.
“Many people already have a certain opinion about me and my work, so I can guess who would be positive and who would be negative even before I start writing the book, and that’s not the case abroad
“Abroad if a book is not considered good, why write about some bad Czech book? Maybe that's why also reviews are sometimes more positive.”
“Also here when a book is published, it might be interesting for someone to, let's say, pull it down, to criticise it.
“Whereas abroad if the book is not considered good, why write about some bad Czech book? So maybe that's why also the reviews are sometimes more positive, because the negative ones aren’t even being printed.”
The description of the life of the writer that we see in the book shows that she needs to learn how to work the grant system, and she has to go to talks and readings as a kind of income stream. You also spoke about the goldfish bowl of the Czech literary world, where criticism often has a kind of personal subtext. It doesn't seem like a very attractive life.
“I love my life of a writer. It gives me a lot of freedom.
“It's exciting, but also sometimes it's not.
“As I said before, the book somehow stems from my experience and I work with my own life there,
“At the same time it's stylised, so this woman is also in many ways much bitchier than I am, and much less grateful, which goes together with her bitchiness.
“But that's how I just worked with her as a character.”
Petra Hůlová’s The Long Version, translated by Alex Zucker, was published last month on the World Editions imprint.
