Trembling is hope

Journalist and essayist Karel Hvížďala is famous for his interviews with important personalities, especially in the Czech political and cultural world. This time he follows up with a completely personal narrative on his interviews with Jiří Přibáň, The Search for History and The Search for Responsibility, and on a series of memoirs collected in the collection Sentence as a Vocation. In his "diary" entries of less than a year, he captures his intimate, private considerations, memories, comments and concerns against the backdrop of domestic and world events, escalating to a fatal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, to war. In the patchwork of current press reports on the domestic pre-election and post-election situation, information about the ongoing pandemic and escalating tensions on the international scene alternates with small, seemingly idiotic incidents. The text is enlivened by excerpts from correspondence with close friends such as Jiří Suchý and Jacques Rupnik. The book is thus a vivid picture of the state of the author's (not only) "private" planet.