Ota Pavel - How I Came To Know Fish (Penguin Classics, 2025) ***

Ota Pavel was a Czech author who died in 1972 at the age of 42. His father was jewish and his mother Christian. His father and two brothers were captured by the Nazis in the second World War imprisoned in concentration camps, from which all three returned alive after the war. The second determining fact about Pavel's life was his bipolar disorder, which resulted in him setting fire to a farm in Innsbrück during the Winter Olympics which he was attending as a sports journalist, his formal profession. 

"I went mad at the winter Olympics in Innsbruck. My brain got cloudy, as if a fog from the Alps had enveloped it. In that condition I came face to face with one gentleman - the Devil. He looked the part! He had hooves, fur, horns, and rotten teeth that looked hundreds of years old. With this figure in my mind I climbed the hills above Innsbruck and torched a farm building. I was convinced that only a brilliant bonfire could burn off that fog. As I was leading the cows and horses from the barn, the Austrian police arrived..."

His third determining fact is his love of fishing and fish, which is the red line in this small book (126 pages) of fourteen short stories. At the beginning I wondered whether this would be something for me, because his fishing expeditions to the local ponds are described with lots of passion, but it's not a subject that interests me at all. Yet gradually, you come to appreciate the quality of his autobiographical writing, and especially the small family, somewhere in Czechoslovakia minding its own business, yet seriously impacted by life and especially the foreign power of Germany. He describes how a platoon of singing German soldiers destroyed the local pond, making fishing impossible. 

"With hoes and spades they turned the soil so that even God wouldn't recognize it. They dynamited the pond where I used to go with the boys of Lidke, scattering its water as they scattered the church. They diverted the brook from Hrebec, and paved the roads with white marble tombstones so they could walk on the names of those who had been sleeping peacefully. And they sang and sang, stopping only to prepare more dynamite. After all, it was impossible, using only hoes and spades, to wipe out white villages from the face of the earth. The Lidke fields were all around me. Mama had worked there, and potatoes and small white flowers grew up everywhere. Potatoes even grew on the graves of executed men and boys, and when the women dug them out they resem­bled human hearts. That was a warning, and nobody took those potatoes home. Only the greedy Hanackova tried it, lugging a bag to her house, and she was dead within a year." (p. 99)

It's a smalltown life sucked up in the grand wheels of history. Pavel's writing does not condemn as much as describes what is happening around him, with a gentle and compassionate view, humour and a precise writing style. 

If you get the chance, read it. There's lots to enjoy in these short stories.