Well-crafted stories about people whose lives slip between their fingers.

Literary fiction

In the collection of ten stories An Impeccable Life in Humility the artist and writer Viktor Špaček relies on his extremely precise and polished language to depict ten individuals whose lives have in some way gone fundamentally wrong. Instead of trying to reverse the unfavourable situation, they choose to ponder when it was that their fate deviated from the original trajectory. Like the young hedonist from the short story “Kostěj”, who becomes a father and suddenly is overlooked by his partner and now has room for reflection. The author brilliantly captures all the different characters with their ambitions, desires and pasts. Although all the stories in the book focus on a similar theme, they do not feel repetitive. The stagnation of the characters’ lives gradually reveals itself to the reader as permanent rather than temporary, which gives the texts a hopeless but also inexorably authentic tone.

Viktor Špaček (1976) is a poet, writer and artist. He studied sculpture and now works freelance as a proof-reader, editor, librarian and teacher of creative writing courses. He published three collections of poems and two collections of short stories. His poems were repeatedly featured in the Best Czech Poetry anthologies.