The story of plum stones, filled with twists and turns, escapades, absurd humour and wonderful linocuts.
Children’s and Young Adult | English sample translation available
The full-page colour linocuts and cartoon input by Chrudoš Valoušek landed this large-scale project a Golden Ribbon Award for artistic achievement of the year as well as victory in the 2018 competition for the Most Beautiful Czech Book for children and young adults, followed shortly afterwards by publication in the Netherlands.
However, we should not overlook the gleeful contribution of Vojtěch Mašek’s fairy-tale text: a boy called Peter converses with a talking log, which reveals its story to him, beginning with its origins as a plum fruit. Its stone turns into another fruit tree. In one episode a professor takes this for an exotic tree and is so disappointed to realize his mistake that he angrily heads off to Australia; a Spanish family move into his house and have the plum tree cut down, so the puppet ends up travelling across the world as a log. The hero’s journey as recounted to his friend constantly abounds with new ideas, developing the tradition of the tomfoolery of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio through distinctive absurd humour.
With slight exaggeration it could be said that whatever discipline Vojtěch Mašek (1977) turns his hand to, his work always meets with incredible success: he was one of the screenwriters on the film Křižáček (The Little Crusader, 2017), which won best film at the festival in Karlovy Vary, while the children’s book Panáček, pecka, švestka, poleno a zase panáček (Puppet, Plum Pit, Plum, Plank and Back to Puppet, 2018), story by Mašek and art by Chrudoš Valoušek, won the prestigious Bologna Ragazzi Award. However, he is most at home in the world of comics, which he creates either on his own or in partnership with other artists and writers. Since 2002, he and Džian Baban have been developing the surreally farcical world of Monstrkabaret Freda Brunolda (Fred Brunold’s Monster Cabaret), which has appeared in five comic books, more than a dozen stage adaptations and in short films. They have also written two award-winning graphic novels with art by Jiří Grus. He also recently worked with the writer Marek Šindelka on the contemporary graphic novel Svatá Barbora (Saint Barbara, art by Marek Pokorný, 2018), and his list of projects continues to grow.