Jiří Hájíček

Rustic Baroque

Trans. Krassimir Prodanov
Селски барок Селски барок
Селски барок
Izida, 2016, 224 pp
9786197040470
Language: Bulgarian
Foreign rights:
Dana Blatná Literary Agency
http://www.dbagency.cz
blatna@dbagency.cz
Goodreads rating
73.6% (Rated by 903 users)
Literary fiction

In recent years there have been few works to take as their subject matter our recent past. And perhaps not one of these has taken as its principal theme collectivization in the villages of the 1950s, at least not until Jiří Hájíček’s novella Rustic Baroque. Hájíček was born in 1967, so he grew up long after this dark period in the life of the country-dweller.

To all appearances the story has unremarkable beginnings one hot summer in the gardens of the castle in Třeboň. Pavel Straňanský is a genealogist who works in the archive putting together family trees, mostly for wealthy expatriates searching for their roots in the old country. A somewhat unusual commission draws him into a relatively recent story which sparks his attention – that of village beauty Rozálie Zandlová and the farmers of Tomašice village.

This solitary seeker wanders around in the South Bohemian countryside, his task to reconstruct from the records of old chronicles and the testimonies of surviving witnesses the story of a statement which landed several farmers in prison. But the threads of the story become more and more tightly entangled, and Pavel discovers that all his detective work, which brings him right into the present, uncovers no clear answers, indeed only further questions. And these questions are always the same, regardless of whether they relate to a story fifty years or just a few weeks old. How should we handle our guilt, our urge to take revenge, forgiveness? And what power does the past work over us?

Information about the original Czech edition

Selský baroko

Other selected published translations (1)

Rustic Baroque English

Селски барок
Izida, 2016, 224 pp
9786197040470
Language: Bulgarian
Foreign rights:
Dana Blatná Literary Agency
http://www.dbagency.cz
blatna@dbagency.cz
Goodreads rating
73.6% (Rated by 903 users)