Fake moustache

How would Milan Kundera's life have unfolded if he had not become a writer? What was his return to his native Brno for a lost novel like? Who will Kundera meet in heaven and how did his Paris meeting with Andrej Babiš go?

 The novel Fake Moustache is an original literary pun, referring in its structure and style to the novels and essays of Milan Kundera, whose work and life became the subject of seven genre-varied parts,
into which the book is divided. The content is ironically provocative, sometimes even parodic. At the same time, it is both timely and disturbing. It thematises the well-known media case of Kundera's alleged denunciation, plays with the assumptions that have been spread about Kundera and his work, as well as with the image that the writer himself created of himself and his texts.

 The plot of the book takes Kundera and other personalities of the literary and political scene to unsuspected places and unexpected, often bizarre situations. Karel Zeithaml builds his novel on a detailed knowledge of the facts and the media and social discussions that have been held and are being held for a long time on the account of the recently deceased writer. In this way, he makes a theme important to Kundera in itself, i.e. the debate about the separation or non-separation of the work from its author, from the author's life and media image. The False Moustache is, like Kundera's novels, a very intelligent book, and a humorous one at that. It presents a masterful persiflage and at the same time a prose that is completely out of step with domestic literary production.

Karel Zeithaml graduated from Charles University in Prague. The novel Fake Moustache is the author's first publication and the result of his long-standing interest in the work of Milan Kundera and postmodern literature in general.

 The author's initial impulse to write this novel came from an emotional and sometimes even comical debate connected with Kundera's alleged denunciation of the agent-pedestrian Dvořáček. An important theme for Karel Zeithaml is the Kundera-like question of the separation between the work and the life of the author.