Window to the west
Did they collude with evil - or did they just live as best they could?
David and Marta spent their entire childhood in normalized Czechoslovakia and are taking the test of adulthood in a year when their native country is undergoing a fundamental change. But the pair of classmates from a Prague elementary school have no complaints about life behind the Iron Curtain - as Husák's children, they move like fish in water in a world steeped in communist ideology. They are burdened by similar issues to their peers in the West: how to fit in, how to get through school duties, how to find your first love... But the great history is in motion, the streets of domestic cities are filled with demonstrators and the totalitarian regime is slowly weakening. Teenagers, however, are more interested in movies, music, the latest fashions or sexual experiences, so they are not exactly flocking to the barricades. But their parents, who have finally built a comfortable existence, are caught off guard by the turn of events. Some are trying to adjust to the new conditions, while others prefer to stay abroad, where they emigrated just before the revolution - or perhaps they escaped in time from a just reckoning? Martha and David meet again after ten years and almost don't recognise each other. The years of socialism, however, marked both of them, as well as the corrupt and consumer-dominated Czech society...
In her new novel, the winner of the Magnesia Litera 2019 for her prose The Theory of the Strange reveals the origins of many of the problems we still face today. For example, the roots of materialism and clientelism, which we usually associate with capitalism.
They wrote about the book:
Someone has said that excellent or brilliant literature is recognized by the fact that one reads with amazement about something that until then one had not considered expressible in language, or at least in literary language. Pavla Horáková excels in this respect.
- Ladislav Nagy on the novel The Theory of Weirdness
The multi-layered text goes beyond the psychological relationship theme and offers a broad social picture.
- the jury of the Magnesia Litera 2019 competition about the book The Theory of Weirdness
Pavla Horáková
(* 1974). A native of Pilsen, she studied translation, interpreting and serbian studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In 2001-2007 she worked as an editor of the English broadcast of the Czech Radio and has been known for her literary translations from English (Vonnegut, Bellow, Pynchon, Banks, etc. ). She introduced herself as an author with the children's detective story The Mystery of the Gravediggers (first edition 2010), later expanded by the volumes The Gravediggers in the Undercastle (2011) and The Gravediggers and the Gravediggers (2012). She contributed to the collective prose Johana (2018). Together with her colleague Jiří Kamen, she created the 20-part radio series Field Post - Stories of Czechs during the First World War, which was the basis for the book collections Přišel befel od Císaře pán (2015) and Zum Befehl, pane lajtnant (2018). The biggest success of the writer living in Prague's Vinohrady district is the 2019 Magnesia Litera Prize for her novel The Theory of Strange Things.
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| Code: | AK1I116 |