Patrik Ouředník’s novel imagines one of the most striking phenomena of the nineteenth century: the founding of “free” settlements in North and South America by Europeans aspiring to a “brighter tomorrow.” These literally hundreds of utopian experiments had one trait in common-the rejection of both social and political revolution as advocated by communists, as well as by socialist and social Catholic reformers. The book, to be published in the fall in Prague and Paris simultaneously, has three parts and two narrators. In the following excerpt from part one, the narrator writes his “profession of faith” in 1902, forty-seven years after the events described in parts two and three of the account.
Praise
“Deliciously Voltairean.”
—Libération
“Patrik Ouředník handles satire with the mastery of a Chinese executioner carving up his victim: behold the enormity of ideological idiocy.”
—Le Magazine Littéraire
“[…] this timeless novel serves as a satiric warning against false heralds of a new Messianic Age.”
—Michaela Burilkov, World Literature in Review
“A treasure of historical and imaginative detail converge in this fascinating work about a group of disenchanted Europeans who travel to Brazil in the mid-19th century to start a utopian society.”
“Utopian ideals are amusingly deflated in The Opportune Moment, 1855, as Ouředník’s satire is rather small and even gentle, but quite effective.”
—M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review