In The Rainstick, following the successful novels Rustic Baroque and Fish Blood, Jiří Hájíček completes his “rural trilogy of moral disquiet”.

Literary fiction

Jiří Hájíček follows his literary investigation of the Czech village of the past with a novel set in the present. Zbyněk, a land administrator, meets a former love he hasn’t seen for many years, in order to help her with an apparently simple property-related problem. Having returned to the country village in which he was born and grew up, Zbyněk is gradually apprised of the unclear circumstances of a land dispute; at the same time he becomes embroiled in personal and marital crisis. He struggles with insomnia, loses his way in the countryside and cadastral maps, while a crazy 18th-century rustic aviator hovers above him like an apparition. A turning point is reached when Zbyněk goes into battle with his face covered in war paint so as “not to wake up as someone else one day”.

One of the most distinctive modern Czech writers, Jiří Hájíček (1967) has written several books suffused with the South Bohemian countryside. His novels have won the Magnesia Litera Award twice and been adapted into a feature film. Hájíček’s work has been translated into a number of languages, including English and Italian, and a short story was selected for the 2017 Best European Fiction anthology published by Dalkey Archive Press (USA).