Networks of various types abound in this complex, densely plotted and intricately symbolic novel. The body of Kryštof Warjak, whose death represents the book’s inciting incident, is found ‘attached to the soil by an unusual sort of filament, like a spiderweb’. Train networks transport victim
‘A day devoted to staying in is the music of a melody nobody has ever played. And when I do have to go out, there’s a bloom coating the people I pass, a frost blurring their features. I can imagine they don’t exist, and in this way love them.’ The Czech writer Zuzana Brabcová opens [&
You may think you know the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but probably not the way Viktor Dyk tells it in this novella (originally serialised in 1911–12). The first chapter focuses primarily on a conversation between the Pied Piper and a young townswoman named Agnes – the matter of catching
Jan Balabán is one of the Czech Republic’s foremost writers of the last half-century, but is hardly known in the UK; very little of his output – three novels (one graphic), a play, a novella and five volumes of short stories – having been translated into English. He died suddenly in 2010 aged
Soon to be available in English for the first time since Czech dissident writer Ludvík Vaculík completed it in 1980, A Czech Dreambook is being hailed by its publisher as ‘the most important work of Czech literature in the last forty years’. Such statements can sometimes be made lightly, but i
Welcome to the Czech Special Riveting Reviews, published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called Velvet Revolution in November 1989 – better known among the wider and older participants in the Anglo-American narrative as ‘The Fall of Communism’ or ‘The Fall of the Berlin
