Promise

The novel The Promise (Requiem for the Fifties) is a deliberate allusion to Friedrich Dürrenmatt' s novella The Promise (Requiem for a Crime Novel), and it is also about an unfulfilled promise. It takes place in the author' s fateful city of Brno, most likely in the middle of the last century. The threads of the divergent plot are moved by alternating narrators, who weave a story rooted in the era of emerging totalitarianism with omnipresent spies. Architect Kamil Modráček is put to a terrible test — he faces the death of his sister as a result of a police investigation. The story then turns into an absurdly symbolic scene of revenge, the results of which take on highly dubious contours.