A fascinating literary experiment about what happens when two people live in the same apartment but never meet each other.

Literary fiction

The Apartment by Jana Šrámková and Jan Němec is a novel born from the idea of showing what happens when two different perspectives are not unified by a single, overarching voice. The two narrators, Zuzana and Daniel, share an apartment, yet each of them inhabits it differently and at different times—she during the week, he only at weekends. Their stories begin at opposite ends of the book and collide in the middle. Zuzana processes her grief through metaphors and constant self-examination; her language often falters, as if constantly searching for an audience for her own thoughts. Contrastingly, Daniel observes reality in a restrained, objective manner; for him, the apartment is principally somewhere to rest, sleep and find some quiet refuge. The two perspectives both complement and contrast with one another, and it is only their alternation which reveals the true shape of the story. The book comes alive in many different forms once the reader realises it can be read in any order and that its individual parts can be interrupted at random. The form of two voices which never come into contact yet mirror one another creates a carefully conceived literary experiment about solitude, the need for self-discovery and the tension between intimate and shared space.