Dan Vyleta, author of the critically acclaimed novel Pavel & I, a lively story of espionage, now lives and works in Sackville. Vyleta was born in Germany and is the son of Czech refugees who left their country in the late 1960s. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and he currently teaches a German literature course for the Modern Languages department of Mount Allison University.
Pavel & I is set in one of the coldest winters on record in post-war Berlin. The story follows a series of unfortunate souls: a decommissioned American GI, a young German street orphan, a British Army colonel, a Russian spy and a prostitute; who all come together from various backgrounds in order to solve a murder and take possession of the victim’s espionage secrets. This patchwork of various personalities and circumstances reveals the very crude human relationships formed in a society divided and shattered by the effects of the Second World War.
Pavel & I is Vyleta’s first novel. With this debut, Vyleta uncovers a fresh look and an exciting new perspective of the past, using his creative narrative talents to recount the stories of a post-war society not yet forgotten.
Vyleta loved to read as a child. He began writing short stories when he was in university, however he didn’t think of it as a reasonable career path. “Part of me wanted to be sensible,” he says, “being an artist wasn’t”. He described himself as having been a young man full of questions. “And I wanted answers,” he notes. He was caught up in his studies and did not know how to go about writing. “Until one day, I decided that that’s what I wanted to be. I realized that this was the most meaningful thing I could be. I wanted to do it well; there was a craft to be learned.”
It’s not easy to be a writer. “You wrestle with doubt every day,” comments Vyleta, “there are moments where your sentences look strange to you.” However, for the author of Pavel & I, the worst moment of doubt was when he received the proof of his book, once it had been edited by the editors: “You look at it and it falls apart, it’s just words. It’s utterly strange to you. That's the step where you have to let go of it. Up to now it was my baby, now it’s a product – something not entirely yours anymore.”
Vyleta wrote Pavel & I while he lived in Berlin. It took him about a year to write the novel and another year for the process of talking to the editor and publishing house until it was on the shelves of bookstores. Vyleta used to walk the streets of Berlin at night and look at the city. “Berlin is literally marked by war. You can see where bombs fell according to the architecture of the buildings. You know how people lived; you get a real physical feel of it.” With the city surrounding him, and with the help of diaries from the war, he was able to write a novel which reaches deep into the darkest corners of the city and human emotions. Vyleta is especially interested in old apartment houses in the city, the idea of living in a small community, and yet “being surrounded by people that you don’t know.”
This idea of being surrounded by people, yet feeling lonely is also present in his upcoming novel The Quiet Twin. The bulk of the writing was done in Sackville. Even though the book is finished and sold to the publishing company, it will be several months until it hits the shelves. The Quiet Twin is set in Vienna, right after the start of the Second World War. “It’s about that moment where you don’t happen to be one of the people the Nazi regime hates. You can kid yourself in believing that the war is not so bad because the prosperity level is better than before,” explains the author.
In the future, Vyleta plans to continue with writing for as long as he can. “The nice thing about writing is that there is no sense that you need to retire from it,” he laughs, “it’s not something you will get worse at.”
Dan Vyleta will read from his debut novel Pavel & I at the Owens Art Gallery on Wednesday, October 28 at 7pm.