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Michal Ajvaz (b. 1949)
Novelist, poet, essayist and translator

In the past two years the work of Michal Ajvaz has been published in three countries (Russia, Poland and Hungary), and publication is pending in three more (the USA, France and Croatia). His latest novel - in spite of its great length - is regarded as one of his most rewarding works. It has earned him great critical acclaim.

Prázdné ulice [Empty Streets]
(novel, 2004, 536 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-209-8)

The novel is set in Prague in 1999. The narrator finds on a rubbish tip on the edge of the city an object whose function is unknown to him. It might be a tool, an emblem, a statue, even a letter from a strange alphabet. It transpires that the object is connected somehow with the mysterious disappearance of a young girl. The narrator searches for the girl while trying to work out the meaning of the unknown object; he feels sure that the object holds the key to the girl's disappearance. His quest takes him to various places, including coffee bars, porter's offices, stations and luxury villas of the nouveaux riches. He digs up several clues and hears talk which connects the object with the girl. The stories transport the reader to New York, an unnamed small town in France, the mountain resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps, Greek islands in the Aegean, South America and Afghanistan. But still the clues do not form a meaningful whole ...

Awards:
Jaroslav Seifert Prize, 2005

Reviews:
"In the context of Czech fiction today, the writing of Michal Ajvaz is a delicious rarity. [...] The themes of Ajvaz's latest novel also make it a highly entertaining read."
(Viktor Šlajchrt, Respekt)

"What we are reading here is the beautiful work of a supreme acrobat, replete with motifs, intrigue, destinies, an infectious joy in the telling, a feast of stories."
(Zdenko Pavelka, Salon)

"In his novel Empty Streets, Michal Ajvaz gives us a story so captivating that it is almost impossible to tear oneself away from it. [...] Without doubt, this is one of the literary events of the season."
(Jiří Zizler, Literární noviny)

"Ajvaz's prose is a specimen of that consummate, epic, creative ability to invent a fictional world in which the reader can seek refuge from the perils of reality."
(Aleš Haman, Tvar)

Extract:
First she wrote poems which revealed certain images when the sun was shining and others when it was raining or snowing. These were poems whose meaning resided in the stirring transitoriness of letters which were incapable of resisting the elements, which were dependent on the weather, which brushed against the passage of time in the simplest present, drawing from it the subtle powers of origin and expiration... Later she wrote several pieces of prose to which she applied different varnishes for directions the plot might follow, so that the heroes would meet, or would miss one another, would die, or would keep going, subject to the weather at the time of reading. Her three friends liked the way her sentences spilled over into tenses which were not those attributed to them, the way they took on rhythms which were not those of the line and the page; they liked the wait for the moment the hand would reveal itself... But for Valerie writings such as these were just exercises and games, the experimental meeting of two different times - the time of the reading and the time of the story - where she explored their behaviour and mutual relationships; they were just a form of preparation for a personal mission whose contours would emerge in the writing of meteorological prose."
"Have you seen any of this changeable writing?"
"No. None of this has survived either. Could be that Valerie destroyed them herself, once the idea of a disappearing book matured into its final form."
"A disappearing book?" We seemed to be approaching the heart of Viola's story.




Antonín Bajaja (b. 1942)
Novelist, poet, journalist

Bajaja's literary works have been awarded numerous prizes. Most recently in 2004, his latest novel – a thorough, fictional anatomy of a lupine and a human soul – received the prestigious Magnesia Litera award for Czech Literature in the Prose category. This work was nominated for the State Prize for Literature in 2003 and has been adapted for radio. It was received by the critics with great enthusiasm.

Zvlčení – Romaneto o vlcích, lidech a úkazech
[Growing Wild – a Tale of Mystery and Imagination about Wolves, Humans, and Phenomena]
(novel, 2003, 266 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-156-3)

Growing Wild has an elaborate composition, which is used to great effect in the build-up of excitement that reaches its climax in a dramatic denouement. The first twelve chapters describe two regularly rotating story lines, where the odd ones concentrate on a human family, the even ones on a family of wolves. This is also reflected in the chapter titles: Humans, and Wolves. The first chapter, opening with the sentence “Yesterday it was exactly two years since it happened”, lets the reader know that the tragic event in question will be described in retrospect. The author works throughout the book with parallels and reflections at various levels of the text (time, space, themes, situations, characters), and the story is often interrupted by internal monologues of the characters from the book, displaying the richness of their thoughts, emotions, memories, and connections with others.
The author presents the fascinating lives of the wolves in great detail, following these parts with poetic descriptions of natural scenes, which enables the reader to create his/her own colourful image of the changing landscape through which the wolves wander.
The lines of narration (wolves, people) intersect in the last three chapters, when the two worlds meet. Here, the author escalates the tempo of the narration by means of rapid switching from one to the other.

Awards:
Magnesia Litera award for prose, 2004

Reviews:
“No matter how we read or perceive Growing Wild, the result will always be the same: this balladic story, with its topic, environment, and style, shows many differences with the rest of contemporary Czech prose work, and represents a truly amazing literary event.”
(Erik Gilk, Aluze)

"Growing Wild is a novel about man face-to-face with wolf, and wolf face-to-face with man; it is also a novel about time, about gods, about God… It is a work of magic realism, in which reality and myth fade one into the other in a world of giddy depths. Told in a language of great purity, besides secrets and passion Bajaja's novel contains a liberating humour which is often invoked by the absurdity of exaggeration. An extraordinary work!"
(Jan Schneider, MF Dnes)

"This writer holds us spellbound with the literary power of his beautiful episodes, the moving scenes from the lives of humans and wolves, his canvas of myths and distant deeds: all of this he adds to the mix of his individual motifs and time scales, more than once with the pin-point of a single word within a sentence or situation."
(tsk, Týdeník Rozhlas)

"It seems to me that this vivid and flexible tale could easily be made into a film. Bajaja's work is surely in the vanguard of the Czech literature of the past few years. It is an enthralling story with an engaging and somewhat mysterious plot which is inventive in terms of both its language and its content. And that is quite something."
(Pavel Kotrla, Týdeník Rozhlas)

"This is a stirring song on the eternal theme of man and nature, an epic with the same power as Olbracht's outlaw of the Carpathians Nikola Šuhaj. A work draws from the greatest depths of the collective memory of all that is living."
(Mojmír Trávníček, Aluze)

"Though the style of the work is economical and understated, it is not unpoetic nor does it lack the charm of the colloquial; indeed, these features serve to raise the effectiveness of the storytelling, making of the prose an extraordinary phenomenon."
(Hugo Rak, Lidové noviny)

"The author has aimed his fifth work at the heights where Márquez and Aitmatov reside, in a kind of storytelling which blends reality with dreams, legends and myths, and time twists like a serpent. For all this, the story remains tethered to the ground of Moravia/Slovakia and its strands come together in the manner of a well-constructed puzzle to create a wonderfully readable work." (výběr-knihy [Books Selection], Salon)

"An ingenious and severe work of parallel tales (…) takes in the conflict between the She-Wolf and Markéta on a kind of classical greatness, the like of which we seldom encounter in Czech fiction."
(Vladimír Vlasák, Xantypa)

Foreign edition:
Logvinov, Belarus

Rights sold to:
Európa, Hungary

Extract:
This feeling of satiation made the surrounding forest seem cosier; for a short while, the wolves could forget the fact of their homelessness. She-Wolf lay on her back and several times turned in pleasure from side to side. Wolf bent down to her, carelessly touching her muzzle. He licked her. She pretended not to notice, but a spark in her slit eyes told him: Just you try! The suitor made a grimace. In raising his chops he bared his fangs. He snarled, seized her by the whiskers; she flinched. Still on her back, she, too, gave a snarl, though its tone was closer to a dove's coo than a dark threat. But Wolf knew that behind her apparent helplessness were braced muscles: he held his victim tight. Her strategem was time-tested: I'm a poor thing, she squealed. He let her go. He knew how things went; their sons and daughters knew it, too. They were waiting for that moment, because there are types of incident whose appeal never wanes; if anything is certain about the co-existence of wolves, it is the presence of passion.
All of a sudden She-Wolf got to her feet. She was beautiful. Wolf, too, struck his most impressive pose, his head held high and his mane tousled. She tossed her head and barked thinly; he raised his tail high and moved it from side to side a few times; both looked into the face of the other but also off into the distance. They were playing hide-and-seek of the most intimate kind. The cubs were watching them. As their patience dwindled, they trembled more and more.

Notes:
Sample translations into German and Polish available.




Radka Denemarková (b. 1968)
Novelist, dramatist, TV screenplay writer, translator, essayist

The author has produced a debut of extraordinary maturity, which has not gone unnoticed in the international arena. In June 2005, Radka Denemarková was invited to the European First Novel Festival in Kiel, Germany.

A já pořád kdo to tluče [Who's That Banging on the Door?]
(novel, 2005, 178 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-219-5)

This eccentric, grotesque, and thrilling story of a murder and a fatal connection between a man and a woman who are both drowning in the misgivings of their solitude might have happened anywhere. Its theatre setting provides a unique space for the expression of deep passions and hysteria. The theatre is a stage on which the curtains will draw for ever – for the energetic actors, the passive voyeurs, the backstage manipulators. There is no possibility of actors stepping in to play our lives. We are not acting in a one-man-show. Our past and our distress cannot be stripped off like a costume. Even the smallest ‘role’ of one’s life should be played with the utmost conscientiousness. Visiting director Buch has only a strange suspicion that this is so, but writer and dramatist Birgit knows it very well. And those whose knowledge is so true are in the danger of being silenced.
A truly mature and ripe first literary fruit, which contains a convoluted parable: a dark image of mankind, with a demonic ring of events that cannot be broken.

Reviews:
"If we take the Hrabal-like division of Czech literature into works from the coffee house and works from the beer hall, this writer is of the former kind. A story of fate in the rarefied atmosphere of the theatre with the media in close attendance, where matters existential are surprisingly insistent, cut through with hints at the truth and mixed allusions for the connoisseur… While the author deals us a world which is acrid and unforgiving, we are not misled by the game of hide-and-seek going on behind the protagonists."
(výběr-knihy [Books Selection], Salon)

"The book is full of that dark, brutal violence which is hidden inside perhaps every one of us; that the world still exists is proof that most of us succeed in keeping it under control. Buch and Stadtherrová let loose their beasts because their ailing souls and wills brook no alternative. The image of the hell they arouse is a powerful warning - this, indeed, is how things might be always and everywhere. The effect is heightened by Denemarková's thoughtful, sumptuous use of language.
(áš, Týdeník Rozhlas)

"A story which at first sight is a classic detective story with the ground plan of a murder investigation turns out to be an impressively pure, sensitive and philosophical moral tale."
(Libor Vodička, Literární noviny)

"This is not a book one reads for entertainment, even though it bears some of the features of a detective story. It is a successful work of Czech literature for the more demanding reader."
(Jan Šícha, Literární noviny)

Rights sold to:
Európa, Hungary

Extract:
“I want to know what your father – a man by the name of Ralf – did in the war.”
Petr Buch struck out. And again. No mercy. Instinctively she covered her face to protect herself; her slight elbows pricked into his chest. One cup broke and the tea seeped away, dripped with indifference over the wooden edging. He forced her against the table. He felt strong. Powerful. It was intoxicating. He swept her onto the table, hitched up her pleated skirt, a white accordion against her chest, up to the chin. She lay as if under the guillotine, the head separated from the lower part of a body which did not belong to her. Whatever was happening between her legs had nothing to do with her; the pain was not hers. She wanted to shout out but was inhibited by her shock, her fear. The months they had shared seemed a momentary tenderness. Now Buch was pushing her hard against the raw wood. Splinters worked themselves into her thighs, buttocks and back as he continued to cut her down, pushing his head violently between her calves to break their vice-like grip. He entered her, kneading her mouth and cheeks from side to side, delighting in the disfiguring of that lovely little face, the smudging of its features. Torn skin continued to tear, as if in the undoing of an invisible zip; her symmetrical sweetness changed to a bloody grimace, a deep, oozing wound.
“You want to know what my father did in the war? You want to know what my father did in the war? You want to know what my father did in the war? Perhaps this, perhaps precisely this.”
A savage, almost blinding light cut treacherously into the dark. The spiteful scream of the closing part of a passage of music. Krásová – whom Klamová had conciliated and soothed with promises of further roles and assurances that working with extraordinary personalities always brought conflict and professional misunderstanding – and Oujezdský, too, were waiting with gratified eagerness to see how the arrangement would work out. An arrangement which Buch had thought through to its tiniest detail. An arrangement which Buch had not seen.
Buch was breathing heavily, clinging to an improvised table centrestage. He had long since switched off the green-shaded lamp.
“It’s very powerful. Remember how you reacted,” Klamová’s voice broke the silent tension. “But Jiří, please, no larking about. Everything carefully timed. We don’t want any injuries.”
“Yeah, and perhaps I should put my arm like this, you know, Jiří, so that I don’t knock you, because …”
Unexpectedly Buch moved, hoisted himself to this feet. A flailing octopus.
“I need some air.”
Surprised, Klamová cleared the way for him along the row of seats. She shrunk back from him, against the coldness of the wall. Buch’s blunt disregard for others. She was not giving up; she would do what she could to prise out of him the cause of his annoyance. Not least because of the astonished actors, who this time had been working with concentration, also thanks to her. She did not wish to play the diplomat with Krásová again.
“But that’s as you wanted it!”
“That’s right. Just as I wanted it.”

Notes:
Sample translations into English, German, French and Polish available.




Richard Erml (b. 1961)
Novelist, theatre critic and journalist

Zuzanka a tibetské velehory [Susanna and the High Mountains of Tibet]
(novel, 2002, 230 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-118-0)

Richard Erml´s first work of fiction is the product of his four-month honeymoon trip to Tibet, Nepal and India with his wife, an expert on Tibet and Tibetan. When he returned he began writing up his notes from the journey in a Prague hospital, where he was recovering from a life-threatening illness. He has produced a work that, thanks to his extraordinary adventures, goes far beyond the classic travel book, series of travel reports or the usual travel diary.

Reviews:
"A highly readable, affectionate and sarcastic, matter-of-fact but also personal, never less than gripping work by a Czech "agent in Tibet" who is also an editor at Divadelní noviny [Theatre News]. A man who at home is a strict critic becomes on his travels an attentive observer who, by means of a journey from the Czech Republic to Tibet and back, reaches distant mountain regions and places hidden in remote darkness, in so doing learning about the deep valleys and mountain ranges within himself. Written as if life depends on it."
(výběr-knihy [Books Selection], Salon)

"[The author] restricts himself to keen personal observation and does not fall into the trap of believing himself capable of analysis on the second day of his stay. Nor does Erml succumb to that other danger which tempts the writer in the mountains: that of poetization, the rendering banal of the abundant beauty which surrounds him."
(Jiří Rulf, Reflex)

Czech writers on the book:
"The way this remarkable book begins is very much to my taste: from the very first sentence, we have the feeling that everything is stake - like in Beethoven's Fifth. A recently divorced man goes away on a four-month honeymoon, his purpose being to get to know the woman he has just married in the context of a totally strange world. The achieving of this knowledge almost costs him his life. What is sometimes a story and sometimes is not, tossing itself from the embrace a romance to that of an intelligent travel guide and back, works to build up an enduring tension. Furthermore, the work is well structured and the language of the telling is evocative, much as if this well-known critic of the theatre wished to demonstrate that which he demands of the dramatist. This is book which is well worth reading!"
(Pavel Kohout)

"This is no ordinary travel book. A Prague intellectual exchanges the milieux of theatre and newspaper office for the uncertainty of a walk "on the tightrope of his own insanity" in the interiors of Tibet, Nepal and India. An adventure which begins as a fairy-tale honeymoon is transformed into a fight for survival in the company of monkeys, rats, beggars, dogs and mounds of tourist-generated rubbish. A single gulp of water puts the lid on the author's physical and mental exhaustion, turning a pilgrimage into a voyage of delirium. Erml is on the brink of paying life's highest price. He has survived to tell a tale which can be read in a single sitting."
(Jáchym Topol)

"The relationship between a man and a woman - and Tibet. Two distinct themes which the author succeeds in bringing together to remarkable effect. He is able to write well and to draw on his memory. On occasion you may have cause to disagree with him, but not for one moment will he bore you. If the quality of a book is judged by how interesting it is, then this is a good book."
(Michal Viewegh)

Extract:
English was now no help to us. Apparently there was no transport. To be sure the Himalayan air was the same as in Kodari but here it was thick with invisible atoms of fear. In the looks, gestures and speech of the people there was a furtiveness and wariness as though they were afraid of being overheard or else, weary and expressionless, they kept their heads firmly down. After a few days most of this would pass unnoticed, like getting used to a peculiar smell that hit you on entering a strange house. However I would never have imagined that here, in a muddy street full of Chinese shops, Chinese eating places, bars with billiard tables and Chinese and Tibetans standing around, I would be entering a place where freedom did not exist, the kind of thing that we had left conclusively behind a few years previously.
We changed some money with a suspicious Tibetan shopkeeper and in the pubs we asked about transport. There were no buses only lorries. We tried our luck with the lorry drivers but they couldn't or wouldn't talk to us. For more than an hour we stood in front of a truck which was being loaded. To force a reaction from the Tibetan driver I tied our rucksacks on top of the lorry driver's cabin. No? We heaved our rucksacks back on our shoulders determined to get to Tibet, if necessary under our own steam.
We waded through swollen streams, the rain became heavier. We passed three Westerners, who watched us from the pub with amazement. Round another sharp bend in the road even we had to take shelter. Then, two lorries drove up. The uncommunicative driver was more forthcoming now that there were no witnesses. He explained that there were police checks on the road and pantomimed a punch on the jaw and that he was afraid. But he was tempted by our money. We tried his colleague who was bolder. Our rucksacks were put under the canvas. Zuzka sat in the cabin and I stood on the running-board. To get ourselves moving, it was not too bad. The main thing, I told myself, was to get out of this dump at the border, even if I did have to jump down when the road narrowed, then catch up with the lorry as it slowly worked its way up the hill.

Notes:
Sample translations into English available.




Martin Fahrner (b. 1964)
Novelist, poet, translator, dramatist

The author's previous work, Steiner or What We Did, was published in Slovenia (in 2005, by Mladinska Knjiga); the Piper house is due to publish a German edition in spring 2006. Martin Fahrner gives frequent readings from his work at international literary events (eg. the Vilencia Literature Festival in Slovenia in 2004, the Warsaw Book Fair in 2005, and he has agreed to take part the Leipzig Book Fair in 2006).

Pošetilost doktora vinnetouologie [The Folly of the Doctor of Winnetouology]
(novella, 2004, 126 pp, paperback, ISBN 80-7227-214-4)

The protagonists of The Folly of the Doctor of Winnetouology are three fellow students. Their friendship is due to a shared combination of tastes and qualities which include a liking for practical jokes, a directness and guilelessness, loyalty to one another and an urge scale the heights of life. But though age overtakes them and fate employs various means by which to squeeze them, their ability to marvel withstands the ravages of time.
This book about friendship, about the overcoming of the weightier problems life serves up, about Good and Evil, has something of the fairy tale about it.

Reviews:
"Fahrner has the rare ability to be simple without being superficial, to be powerful without the need to rely on an expressive vocabulary, to take the optimistic view in a fashion which convinces. [...] Among Fahrner's strengths are the scenes in which he achieves an almost filmic emphasis. He is a writer who builds his tale and moves forward his plot in short chapters and with maximum economy. And most precious of all: as we read his book we are all the time aware that it is possible to exist in the space between the small-town idyll and the 'wilder' fictions of today, that a gaze seemingly naive and full of hope can succeed in capturing 'what is important' in life."
(Ondřej Horák, Lidové noviny)

"Petr Šabach? Ota Pavel? Perhaps even Robert Fulghum? It doesn't take much to find hints of all three in Martin Fahrner's latest, The Folly of the Doctor of Winnetouology. In Steiner or What We Did Fahrner showed us once before how interesting a work about the fortunes of a Czech family at the end of the 20th century can be, a work which is entirely unexperimental, traditional, and sedately told.
The writer's approach to the story of three friends from a teacher-training school is similar, with a reliable narrator and a hint of nostalgia, a benign philosophy and a rather unexpected, and for that the more welcome, slice of humour.
[...] At a fundamental level this writer's view of the world does not change; his heroes fight for a little private happiness to add to the condition they demand of themselves – that they should remain decent people. And it is this, of course, which leads them into situations they find difficult to deal with. They have the good fortune to know that if all that you fear comes to pass, 'in place of the fear there appears an unknown, inexplicable feeling of freedom which fills you with joy'. Fahrner's practised hand scatters throughout the text such examples of Buddhist-like wisdom, on occasions using them to form the uninsistent centrepiece of a chapter."
(Stanislav Dvořák, novinky.cz)

"Once opened, this book will refuse to grant the reader safe exit from its world of smiles and melancholy. Fahrner's tender, cruel storytelling world is well worth a visit."
(Tomáš Sedláček, Czech Radio 3-Vltava)

"To visit the doctor with a gash which apart from blood contains sardines in oil and penicillin for use on calves is no everyday occurrence. To his great credit Martin Fahrner is able to describe as if spontaneously such bizarre events so as to make them convincing. But do not be misled, The Folly of the Doctor of Winnetouology is no freely expressed trail of strange happenings. It is founded on a powerful story, the heroes of which are three friends from student days. Descriptions of how life grinds a person down and robs him of his ideals are hardy anything new, but with Fahrner an impression of banality and feelings of boredom never encroach."
(Patricia Drati, Elle)

"The heroes share a combination of tastes and qualities which include a liking for practical jokes, a directness and guilelessness, sticking to one´s principles and the urge scale the heights of life. But though age overtakes them and fate employs various means by which to squeeze them, their ability to marvel withstands the ravages of time."
(Knižní tipy [Good book tips], iDNES.cz)

"This work of Fahrner's is not a series of funny stories about classmates at a teacher-training institute. It may be that good works are not valued, and they may even produce bad results; friendship may change into hate or indifference and an unwillingness to listen. Within us all is a little piece of Winnetou, hovering on the edge of honour and integrity, though the daily quest for the lost totem has little in common with the treasure of the Silver Lake."
(výběr-knihy [Books Selection], Salon)

Extract:
My father agreed to meet us in the station restaurant. We found him over a game of chess. There were still a few pieces on the board and Dad asked us to be patient. We sat down at the next table and waited. After a while he got up to go to the toilet; when he came back he started screaming that some bastard had moved his pieces and swizzed him out of a certain checkmate. We knew then that they were playing for money and that all those sitting gaping around the table had placed bets as well. The atmosphere thickened as no one seemed prepared to part with his stake; as the bands drew closer to one another it was clear that the one which included my father was lamentably smaller. At first it looked as though the men would be happy to do no more than strike a few menacing poses, but then they went for each other. The opposition got Dad's group against the wall. I got to my feet. Bláha gave me a smile of regret, as if to say, "What else can we do, as it's your dad?" He shoved me aside and threw himself into the fray, catching hold of the elbow of a man who had Dad by the throat, screaming that he should let him go or else. The ruffian cast him a look of derision, at which Bláha raged: "OK, maybe you will give me a good hiding, but before you do I'll give you a good slapping myself!"
Within seconds I was flooded with a sense of beauty. Bláha was right. Evil can do as it will, let it be as strong as it wishes, but always, before it gives us that hiding, we can give it at least one good slap! The feeling lasted several seconds longer, until the ruffian's expression hardened and Bláha was knocked to the floor before he could get that good slapping in.
[...]
At that time I often laid my head against my wife's breasts, lying there for ages with my eyes closed, just listening. The regularity of her breaths and heartbeat always succeeded in convincing me that the basics were in good order, that everything was in its rightful place. Even then, having gone through that most difficult of times, I never gave up believing that happiness contains a great power; even then I was able to run before my eyes a film comprising moments of happiness and nothing else. All the rest stayed somewhere on the cutting room floor, all that hadn't worked out and hadn't been used; you just have to accept it.




Stanislav Komárek (b. 1958)
Novelist, essayist, columnist

Stanislav Komárek's first venture into fiction was with a novel with generational ambitions – Opšlstisova nadace [The Opšlstis Foundation, 2003]. The book was published in Germany by Rowohlt in September 2005 under the title Kaplans Traum. The world foreign rights for the author´s first novel are in the hands of Rowohlt.
Komárek's second and latest novel is Černý domeček [The Little Black House].

Černý domeček [The Little Black House]
(novel, 2004, 238 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-186-5)

Although the residents of the Little Black House, which was long ago purchased by the tailor Vodrážka, live in the dramatically changing world of the twentieth century, they are affected only obliquely by all the social upheavals. Over the generations, the little house has become the centre of their universe, as if it exerted over them some kind of secret force … But the book’s main theme is neither the family nor social development, but rather hidden aspects of the everyday, the way in which the fibres of fate are bound together. Though ordinary life in small-town South Bohemia has changed little in a hundred years, the author’s take on things – enriched by historical and etymological explanations and essay-style observations – makes of this a gripping story something more enthralling than many an event of “world” significance.

Reviews:
“… [the author] makes an inventory of Czech history as if performing a naturalistic vivisection, in which the lives of several generations appear as a sequence of strokes of fate recorded in the biological-sociological register. Here, spirituality and history-making are subject to the inscrutable, unchallengeable dictates of procreation and dying, staying alive and a condition of inertia in those who rule, all of which show no regard for ideology, politics, culture, or any other external 'rubbish'. One simply has to live, and this is perhaps the only thing there is to say on the subject; still, it is immensely interesting to observe, describe and compare individual manifestations and forms of this basic cosmic force. Komárek achieves this with real gusto and erudition, flaunting his skills as a fabulist.”
(Jiří Peňás, Literární noviny)

"In his second novel Stanislav Komárek succeeds splendidly in drawing together genres as diverse as the chronicle, the essay, the thoughtless conversation about whatever or nothing. [...] Komárek whisks us through the twentieth century at a relentless pace, but his window on the world has much to show us."
(Gabriel Pleska, Tvar)

"By the dispassionate nature of its point of view and its sense of historical irony, this work of Komárek's is reminiscent of Patrik Ouředník's Europeana, even if in formal terms these two works are very different to one another. The great pace of events of the twentieth century and their influence on human life per se seem to provide ever greater inspiration for authors of diverse types."
(Antonín K. K. Kudláč, Host)

"Stanislav Komárek tells his story of The Little Black House in a language which is fresh and lustrous. His poetics is a stranger to over-adornment and empty phrasemaking. For all this, the work is interlaced and brightened with meanderings, essayist's insertions, and interpretations of history, philosophy, etymology and ethology."
(Milena M. Marešová, Lidové noviny)

"The Little Black House [...] is, as we might have expected of Komárek, an essay of great range and charm, overflowing with polyhistorical insights and a kindly if ironic openness to the world. [...] For individuals he has less time, handling them much as a Hollywood film-maker would treat his supporting actors. There is no display of deeper human psychology; the characters are simply led on to the stage, described in outline, several important incidents in their lives are detailed, and then they die. This approach is hardly typical of Czech literature, and it is refreshing. We are here, as are other people, and the differences between us and them are like those between beetles and bugs; whether we like it or not, our lives are determined by more powerful forces and systems than we, in our obstinacy, care to admit."
(Zdenko Pavelka, Salon)

Extract:
Anna's face became a picture of her unsound mind; everyone, including her husband, began to go in fear of her. With candle and knife she went to the henhouse, out of which she pulled her favourite white hen, the one she called "Beauty". Then she went into the garden and yelled out in a voice totally unlike her own: "You black monster! You'll not get my little Marie! You're not having her! Take this!" And she drove the knife through the hen's side and into its heart. She flung the dying bird against the trunk of the biggest apple tree and, once it was dead, dug out its grave with a hoe. She returned to the house to fetch a bottle of paraffin from the closet. She poured a little of this into the lamp and then gave the rest of it to little Marie to drink. Little Marie, for all her fatigue, resisted this drink with all the power she possessed. The child began to vomit convulsively and this gave way to a fearful fit of coughing; among the vomit and thrown-up paraffin in the little annex was a litter of large pieces of white membrane, which the child had succeeded in tearing from her innards and coughing up. Towards daybreak the two of them fell asleep from exhaustion. When in the late morning Vodrážka's wife went out into the garden and found a deep hole at the place of yesterday's sacrifice (during the night Vaněk the butcher's great black dog had burrowed underneath the fence and devoured the hen), she knew from what she saw that little Marie was not going to die. It may have been so that she was ignorant of the price and consequences of the pressure of progress, but at that moment such thoughts would have been of little significance to her.
As things were it took little Marie several weeks to recover; in their small town more than twenty children died at that time. Little white coffins and a cortege at whose head a child mourner in white carried a lighted candle, while a second child in a black veil went behind with a broken candle: this became a part of the town's routine.




Jaroslav Pížl (b. 1961)
Poet, novelist

Jarolav Pížl is the author of five collections of poetry which are marked by a peculiar imagery and a keen sense in his verse for the spoken word. His latest work, however, is a novel.

Sběratelé knih [Book Collectors]
(novel, 2004, 216 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-195-4)

Two books in one: the first book comprises the story of collector (or to be more precise, burglar) Jiří Ryska, and it has all that we might expect of an action-packed narrative; into this are inserted long extracts from Free Fall in Tahúlú, the story of Tristan Ab, found and claimed by Ryska; this second book is based on principles of science fiction and hints at the mystical secret of life and death.

Reviews:
"Pížl meets all the requirements for the writing of so-called popular literature: language which lives and breathes, a keen eye for detail which he expresses succinctly and to great effect, great ideas, and the ability to invoke tension in the reader."
(Lukáš Foldyna, Host)

"I like books in which they themselves appear in the main role; subconsciously perhaps, I approach such books in a positive frame of mind, all the more so if their plot is veiled in secrecy and it is stocked with a detective storyline. The wide popularity of such books is testified to by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, which has long held the top spot in the bestseller lists. I would put Book Collectors, which is published by the Petrov house, in the same category. [...] We can claim with confidence that Pížl's entry into the world of fiction is a success."
(Pavel Kotrla, Týdeník Rozhlas)

"Pížl's novel is characterized by tension, adventure, fantasy and the smell of old print. [...] If you like the novels of Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, Baudolino, The Island of the Day Before), the works of Miloš Urban (The Seven Churches, Hastrman, The Shadow of the Cathedral) or you enjoyed Jonáš Tokarský's Alchemist's Child, if it's your thing to be conducted around everyday realities in which secrets lie behind every corner, and if my recommendation carries any weight with you, I would say that Book Collectors is just the book for you."
(Josef Prokop, Reflex)

Extract:
It was Boris. It seems his original intention was to go down to the cellar, though now he was making for the steps. Then he stopped, peered about the landing in the deepening dusk. As the dusk became total darkness he was unable to see as well as he needed to. He looked straight at me, but the shadow thrown by the lighted panel in which I was crouching was at that moment too deep for his eyes to penetrate. For a time it seemed that all he could see was the shadow. But then his focus sharpened and he realised what he was looking at. I realised that he had realised.
"There you are," he said, his tone almost soft. He stepped back a little. "Get up."
I raised myself. I had the advantage. All he could make out was my outline; I had been able to look into his face. He was just trying it on.
He shouldn't even be here. If things had been fair, he'd still have been promenading in front of the cafe and that game of hide-and-seek on the steps would never have taken place. We want it, Pilot had said. Of course he did. And it seemed they really did want to reduce their outgoings, in spite of all the talk.
And on top of that, perhaps: No witnesses, Boris.
When he swung a right at me he was no longer grinning. The light from the yard was causing the knuckle-duster to sparkle as he prepared it.
I felt the adrenaline whip through my body. But in my mind there was still a space of quiet and calm. If you can do that, instead of upsetting you the adrenaline can speed up your perception. If you've got anything about you, you've got somebody like Boris in the palm of your hand.
It was like a film in slow motion. The fist was flying. I had plenty of time. I looked at the fist and then moved my head back. The punch stopped short of my eye: the arm could reach no further. Now it was my turn. From that place in my head I was controlling myself like a puppet. I lowered my centre of gravity and moved closer in towards his flailing arm. Then I unleashed my neatly packed fist at an angle from below, the knuckles nice and forward-facing, against his chin. Maybe once it had been firm, some time in the distant past, say four, five seconds ago. Now it might have belonged to a cutout doll. It simply snapped. And Boris fell to the ground.

Notes:
Sample translations into Polish available.




Bestsellers:

Irena Dousková (b. 1964)
novelist, short-story writer, poet

Hrdý Budžes [Proud Budžes]
(novel, 1998, 2002; 168 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-132-6-, 20,000 copies sold)

The story of this book is told by a young girl who is at once smart and naive. Helenka guides us through the first years of the “government” of the communist president Husák, describing comic as well as less amusing episodes and situations involving children and grown-ups in one town in the course of a year. The short episodes create a compact story which reveals both the small and greater tragedies of Helenka’s childhood, all presented with a comforting forgiveness.

Dramatisations of the novel Proud Budžes have been extremely successful (2002/2003 Příbram Theatre, 2003 – 2005/6 Bez Zábradlí Theatre in Prague; TV recording of the play – broadcast on the ČT1 channel, 2003, 2004, 2005; a radio play in ten parts based on the book has been broadcast on Czech Radio 3 – Vltava).

Reviews:
“Every one of us drags some traumas from childhood into later, adult life. Some people manage to cope with these quite well while others lock them inside themselves for the rest of their lives. Irena Dousková is definitely not pampering hers in her novel Proud Budžes. She depicts the world of her childhood as seen by a girl in the second year of elementary school in the town of Ničín, offering a radical and unusual attitude to the era of Normalization in Czechoslovakia and in particular to the world of grown-ups, who are ‘not as mischievous as children, are generally much nicer and don’t laugh at each other for being fat!’ (…) By its very nature Proud Budžes is a light, relaxed, gentle and intelligent read which will provoke the reader to tears of laughter and nose-blows of nostalgia."
(Bára Gregorová, iliteratura)

"Proud Budžes is one of those works of literature (compare, in Czech, Striptease Chicago, written in exile by Jan Novák, and Britain's Diaries of Adrian Mole) in which the account of a child - in all its stunning authenticity - is an instrument of revelation and accusation of the imperfect adult world.
The intense witness of a nine-year-old girl is by turns moving and comic, not least by the language in which it is borne. The girl's voice tells of more than our roots, human relations, the world as she finds it: the power of communist tyranny to crush the family seems almost a matter of secondary importance, part of a later plan."
(Jan Čulík, Britské listy)

"An exceptional eye for detail and an extraordinary understanding of the mind of a child makes of this early Seventies retrospective a fresh and lively variation on that eternal theme "báječná léta pod psa" ["blissful years of lousy living"]."
(Vladimír Novotný, Lidové noviny)

"The many short chapters are in fact satires on Husák's regime, caricatures of its narrowness and brutality. For her own safety the author has entered the mind of a child, where things have different dimensions and the gap between joy and despair is almost imperceptible, though the sensations of joy and despair are far deeper and much harder on the nerves. [...] Czech prose has never before offered such a view of the misery of Husák's Normalization."
(Milan Jungman, Týden)

Rights sold to:
Colibri, Bulgaria; DTV, Germany; Zysk i S-ka Wydawnictwo, Poland

Extract:
The school dining room was all done up with flags and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's head and we had a special lunch. Chicken and potatoes. The chicken wasn't as good as Grandma's in Zakopy - its skin wasn't brown and crisp but white and wet, sort of. But anyway, it was better than usual. Our school cooks normally give us really weird stuff. Like dry pasta with scraps of ham in it, or risotto, and then these sort of tendon-y type things, I don't know what they're called, those white-ish, see-through ones, hard, kind of like meat but not really meat, and with them macaroni, cold potatoes, cold dumplings and this smelly brown sauce. They're the lunches they give us most often. Sometimes there's stewed carrot next to the tendons. That's a really sad meal as well. Anyway, it doesn't matter if it's a special occasion, like with the chicken, or that time there were little cakes in that sweet cream with wine in it for the liberation of our homeland by the Soviet army, the dining room still really stinks. You can smell it all over the school and in summer you can even smell it outside. Not like the toilets or anything. It's like all those meals that nobody likes all mixed up together. Even the teachers don't like them. Whenever we have something horrible, instead of eating it themselves they keep looking at us to make sure we're eating it. Those who are being supervisor, one or two of them at a time, they're the worst, but anyway all the teachers watch us at least a bit.
If it's hash, three of them are supervisor. That makes it really hard to get to the hatch with any of the stuff still on your plate. If you can manage that, then you're OK. Through the hatch all you can see is the cook's belly or breasts, it depends who it is, and these hands with a spatula in them. But if there's lots of stuff left on your plate, a head appears and yells at you. But by then you don't really care, the main thing is you've got there. Usually we tip all the leftovers onto one plate, then one of us goes to ask the supervisor something and the quickest grabs the plate and makes a run for it. Only thing is, if the girls are ignoring me, which happens quite often, I have to do it on my own.
Last week I made a run for it with the tendons in dill sauce, and I was nearly at the hatch when suddenly the classroom assistant yelled out at me. She'd been spying on us from behind a column. I jumped, fell over, smashed the plate, spilt the sauce, some of it got on the classroom assistant, and then she wrote a note to my parents in my homework diary.

Notes:
Sample translations into English and Italian available.




Michal Viewegh (b. 1962)
novelist and author of short stories and newspaper columns
No. 1 best-selling Czech author, outright leader in the bestseller lists for fiction over several years

The books of Michal Viewegh have been translated into 21 languages; three films have been made based on the author’s novels, while two more are currently in production. One of his works has been adapted for the stage and has been performed on many occasions. More than 750,000 copies of Viewegh’s books have been sold in the Czech Republic alone.

Vybíjená [Playing Pig-in-the-Middle]
(novel, 2004, 214 pp, hardback, ISBN 80-7227-191-1, 65, 000 copies sold)

Over a generous time span, this book follows the varied lives of several high-school classmates, from their teenage growing pains to their early forties. Connoisseurs of the work of the most popular Czech author will find intact his familiar style (the slightly melancholic grotesque), in a tale which deals with friendship, love and destiny, alcohol, beauty and ugliness, and above all with the sadness that slowly penetrates the lives of the ageing characters.

Award:
Magnesia Litera - Readers' award

Reviews:
"School reunions supply rich pickings for the contemplation of human destinies and unfulfilled desires. While teenage love is reignited, death shows itself in the non-appearance of those classmates who have departed for ever. For those themes which require, in addition to the writer's know-how, a certain experience of life, Viewegh acquits himself admirably. Not only is the composition of the novel is masterly but Viewegh shows himself to be a keen observer of everyday life."
(Aleš Knapp, MF Dnes)

"Playing Pig-in-the-Middle, the latest novel by Michal Viewegh, heralds the author's return to the thoughtful, finely honed prose for which he gained the acclaim of critics and readers alike in the mid Nineties. [...]
Playing Pig-in-the-Middle is more than just a story about former classmates at a grammar school, their friendships and desertions, how they help and harm one another, their marriages and divorces. In a stylish telling which surely owes much to personal experience, Viewegh confronts mid-life crisis as part of a deeper reflection on life's linearity. [...]
The revelation of dramas behind the props of the everyday lead the unwitting reader to thoughts of how many of these dramas are at play behind the faces of those they meet, and have long been meeting, every day of their lives."
(Petr Kukal, stolzova.cz)

"This novel bears all the typical features of Viewegh's style of visualization and characterization, marked with humour and an ironic distance. Playing Pig-in-the-Middle may prove to be a springboard to a creative rebirth; indeed, here Viewegh's art has succeeded better than in some of his previous works in touching important moments of human existence. Without moralizing and by means of a lightly-wielded pen he has invested his work with a warning: how easy it is to squander a life."
(Emil Lukeš, Tvar)

"Viewed alongside his other works, Viewegh's Playing Pig-in-the-Middle can be said to represent something of a turning point. [...] Michal Viewegh has shown us already that he is, at least in the context of Czech literature, an important writer. Playing Pig-in-the-Middle suggests he is on the point of something greater, and this irrespective of context."
(Lukáš Foldyna, Aluze)

Foreign editions:
L.C.A., Slovakia; Deuticke/Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Germany; Alfa-Narodna knjiga, Serbia and Montenegro

Rights sold to:
Sanje, Slovenia; Swiat Literacki, Poland; Divić, Croatia; Innostrannaya Literatura, Russia; Ulpius Ház, Hungary; Colibri, Bulgaria

Extract:
For a change, so that my fun was healthy and I didn't get those urges, I had to go to Wednesday's Sport and Games lesson, which in the case of our grammar school is a purely formal name for what is really common or garden pig-in-the-middle.
"You're not being serious, Dad, are you? You can't mean it that if I play pig-in-the-middle I won't get urges!"
"Look, you're going do it, and that's an end to it."
"You must be making this up! You really think that if I allow myself to be beaten up with a ball once a week, I won't have sinful thoughts?"
You'll never guess what his answer was.
"Healthy body, healthy mind!"
I beat my ugly head against the table but still my father refused to bend. His commands were as dogmatic as the Pope's, and just as absurd, just as much a stranger to common sense - whatever, he clung to them for all he was worth.

Pig-in-the-middle. Captain. Could be that for the attractive, gifted athlete these terms and others from childhood like them have a magical ring which makes them go all sentimental. But I can assure you that we the ugly still shudder at the sound of them in our forties. This is how you play pig-in-the-middle: you run from line to line like a frightened animal, dodging a ball which is whizzing back and forth - in the full knowledge that sooner or later one of your lovely classmates will drive the ball into your stomach or kidneys from close range. You groan in comic fashion, your features distort in pain, you fight back the tears which are drumming against your eyes, and, with the mockery of your opponents (and often your team-mates) hanging in the air, you go and stand behind the line. Unlike the so-called captains you only have one life, so your role in the game is over once and for all. I was struck so many times that I lost count. The number of beatings I took would have stood me in good stead for years to come. I've been through quite a lot in life - still, one encounters such a concentrated display of human cruelty but rarely. The whole of my youth spent behind that line in a state of humiliation, so that my storm could blow itself out. Battered with a ball for the whole of my youth, just so there was no chance of my getting off with a bus driver or some such.

The captains would choose their teams: the best players first, of course, then those of average ability, until they got to Skippy, me and Větvičková (in that order). And there it is, what is practically a role for life: second from last. Inadequate for life, not dire enough for suicide.



©Petrov, 2005
Foreign Rights Manager: Dana Blatná
Contact: blatna@ipetrov.cz
/Translated by Andrew Oakland/