Prose

Exploring writing (both his own and that of the others), living with literature and in literature – that is the life story of Petr Král (1941), a poet, novelist, essayist and translator who spent almost forty years in France. It makes no sense to ask the following question about this experimental prose “without a story” consisting of fragments ranging from one sentence to several pages, called Honey Skittles, divided into five parts: “What is it really about?” The reader enters the sea of text and only there does he find out whether he is a swimmer or whether it is the text that buoys him up, whether Král’s words have their own story. It’s a different kind of reading experience, with a surreal hallmark but, at the same time, free from rules and formulas. For one person, it is only verbal acrobatics, while for another, it is the very beginning of the Story. Král’s book met with a relatively strong critical response in Czech literary journals and has thus become the unplanned reference point of the currently moribund literary discussion.