Authors & Works
Marianne Sluszny: Le frere du pendu
Translation: Jovanka Šotolová
The young filmmaker Tomas discovers journals in the suitcase of his young fiance containing notes about the life of an unbreakable man, Meier Kovalský, born in 1880 in Siedlice, Poland, whose brother the Kazaks hanged. He is so taken with them that he decides to reconstruct the unsettling fate of this eternal outcast, which is actually the fate of the entire 20th century.
Boualem Sansal: Le village de l’Allemand
Translation: Kateřina Vinšová, Pistorius a Olšanská 2012
Rachel and Malrich Schiller are half Algerian on their mother’s side and German on their father’s, yet they live in a Parisian suburb. After their parents are murdered by Islamists, the elder Rachel returned to Algeria to visit the villiage of her birth. There, however, she discovered a shattering truth, that her father served as a high officer of the SS in extermination camps.
Josef Haslinger: Jachymov
Translation: Libuše Čižmárová, Jota 2012
This document-laden novel captures the tragic fates of the Czech national hockey team which fought for the world title in 1949 only for its players to be sentenced with severe punishments one year later for an alleged conspiracy. The author pays closest attention the career, private life, and prison experiences of the goalie Bohumil Modrý, who received the harshest sentence.
Melinda Nadj-Abonji: Tauben fliegen hoch
Translation: Lucy Topoľská, Jota 2011
In a Chevrolette with Swiss tags the Kocsis family arrived at their home villiage of Vajvodina in the north of Serbia. In the villiage everything was at first glance as it had been earlier: mother is still here, they drink Traubi soda, and weddings are celebrated exhuberantly. Evenso, the idyll has cracks. Tito died three weeks earlier. Father and uncle argue ever more aggresively about politics…
José Saramago: Cain
Translation: Lada Weissová, Plus 2011
A young man killed his own brother due to unclear reasons. After the murder followed the sentence. The sentence was exile. The man was named Kain and his story has been know already for two-thousand years. This age-old story of guilt and punishment has experienced manifold reworkings. In this author’s version it is told full of humor and slowly increasing tension.
John Ajvide Lindqvist - Hanteringen av odöda
Translation: Jana Holá, Argo 2012
While the novel plays with the classic horror theme of zombies, in the author’s version the animated corpses are no scary, carnivorous monsters; rather they are pained creatures, who want, like the rest of us, only one thing: to return home. The result is a chilling horror with all of the trappings and simultaneously a love story that defies death itself.
Janusz Rudnicki: Mój Wehrmacht
Translation: Věra Vytřísalová, Dauphin 2012
The unmistakably curt, ironic, and dramatic styl of this book calls upon the very best traditions of the Polish black grotesque and its exquisit sense of humor, which therewithal touches upon existential themes. The short-story form suits the author wonderfully because within them he can fully exploit his talent for observation and his art of combining high literary language with well chosen vulgarities.
Anna Enquist: Contrapunkt
Translation: Magda de Bruin Hüblová, Mladá fronta 2011
Nothing is more painful than the loss of a loved one. And nothing is more devastating than the gradual fading of memories of the dead. After the tragic death of her daughter, a mother does not want to accept that time dissolves memories once so alive. Only once she begins to study Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” to interpret its score and to play the composition, does a bridge to her deceased daughter appear in music.
Mario Vargas Llosa : El sueno del celta
Translation: Jana Novotná, Garamond, 2011
The newest novel from the Nobel Laureate encompasses in one package all of his favorite themes. The reader, along with the main protagonist, Roger Casement, a British diplomat of Irish descent, arrives first in the Congo during the time of rubber fever, then, in the very next moment, in the Amazon at the beginning of the century, and at the time of the First World War he observes the first attempts at winning Irish independence.
Krisztián Grecsó
Translation: Ana Okrouhlá, Kniha Zlín 2011
This novel with a mystical twist depicts an encounter with the devil-seducer, which plays out within the Tótváros – Feketeváros – Köröstorok triangle, a place that is somehow reminiscent of historical Transylvania, where various nationalities live together and, most significantly, somehow get along together pragmatically, though never ideally, but also without any sort of extreem nationalism.
Michael Kumpfmüller: Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens
Translation: Věra Koubová, Mladá fronta 2012
In 1923, on a therapeutic visit to the Baltic Sea, Franz Kafka, then an author known only to a small circle of readers, met the twenty-five year old cook, Dora Diamantová. And within a few weeks he chose for himself something that he had until then considered impossible: a shared life as a couple, and what’s more, in turbulent and hyperinflation-afflicted postwar Berlin.
David Nicholls: One day
Translation: Dominika Křesťanová, Argo 2011
A comedically written story of a relationship that evolved from an evening’s accidental acquaintance into a faithful but also unfaithful friendship, and then into a deep love and short marriage. Under its comedic surface the novel captures not only changes in British customs and manners over the past twenty years, but also the deep antagonism between youthful intransigence and the compromises that we are willing to tolerate in the end.
Claudio Magris: Alla cieca
Translation: Kateřina Vinšová, Mladá fronta
The novel is the monologue of an old man, a patient at the psychological hospital in Trieste, whose lament illuminates the horrors of the death camps of a few ideological systems. Cippico - one of the names that he proudly takes on - jumps around in his narration, digressing into stories of other people with whom he identifies. Through it all, the one unifying factor is the ever-present sea.
Roy Jacobsen : Vidunderbarn
Translation: Jarka Vrbová, Pistorius a Olšanská, 2011
Ten-year-old Finn lives a quiet life with his mother, before the arrival of her half-sister disturbs the established order. Finn’s mother welcomes Linda into her family after her ex-husband dies and Linda’s mother is placed in a psychiatric ward. Finn, who must protect her, comes to a painful realization about the way society treats people who are a little different.
Peter Terrin: De bewaker
Translation: Jitka Růžičková, Dauphin 2012
Harry and Michel work as security guards in the underground parkinglot of a luxury apartment complex. Both men remain at their posts permanently and without interruption. Only from time to time does “the organization” replenish their stores of food and supplies. When one day all of the residents abandon the building, it only confirms their supsicion that the world outside has fallen to war or another catastrophe…
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