A sparkling, fragmentary guide to a foreign city with elements of magical realism, narrated from the perspective of a fly.

Literary fiction, Travelogue

Thanks to the publishing house Větrné Mlýny’s idea to compile a literary Baedeker, Dora Kaprálová has produced a remarkable and melancholic prose work, weaving together the past and present. The highly fragmentary text is tightly interlinked and meticulously composed. With her sharp observational abilities and linguistic inventiveness, the narrator circles around Maribor and its cultural memory as a common housefly—which is both an object of fascination and the perspective from which the world is viewed. The love story between a Maribor hypnotist, Svengali, and his girlfriend, the fly-weight Elis, brings elements of magical realism into the novella. As the narrator wanders through the city and encounters its inhabitants, it is as if both nothing and everything is happening. Although she focuses on one Central European location, the atmosphere of the contemporary world, including the omnipresent influence of disinformation, steals into her narrative with sophistication.

 

Dora Kaprálová (1975) was born in Brno and now lives and works mainly in Berlin. An award-winning author of books for both adults and children, she has also produced radio documentaries and a wide range of reportage. In recent years, she has increasingly collaborated with Czech theatres. Following prose works published by Druhé město (Berlin Notebook, Islands, Suffering and Other Genres, A Winter Book of Love) and Baobab (Mr Nobody and the White Darkness), her novella Maribor Hypnosis was brought out by Větrné Mlýny.