Literary fiction
The brilliantly described journey of a young academic-intellectual in search of freedom and the meaning of life.
The narrator, Ada Sabová, a young academic from the “Institute of Interdepartmental Human Studies”, is in many ways typical (though not stereotypical) of modern intellectuals trying to balance their personal life with their career. She has been through many things in both of them and so is guilty of a certain cynicism, or rather of an informed, sarcastic view of the world, the people around her, and herself. While searching for a colleague’s lost son, she notes the apparent coincidences around her, behind which, however, she senses a regularity and interdependence. She looks for an overarching definition of all these phenomena in her “theory of strangeness” and discovers that she cannot grasp the infinite complexity of the world through reason alone. And while the society around her clings on increasingly tightly to vacuous rules, Ada abandons their structures one by one and sets out towards freedom.
Information about the original Czech edition
Other selected published translations (1)
Teoría de la extrañeza Spanish