Literary fiction, Prose

Making sense of your life and getting to the bottom of your identity isn’t always a good thing.

Let us imagine Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Magpie on the Gallows, in which a boy sees the magpie sitting on a strange swing while a man fails to notice the bird because the sole focus of his attention is the gallows. The life of the novel’s protagonist, who is growing up in a ramshackle house on the fringes of a North Bohemian backwater with an alcoholic father, unfolds between these two perspectives. Although the hero is of above-average intelligence and learns to read earlier than his peers, his father’s warped views on education remain in thrall to spectre-filled ignorance that is practically medieval. As the hero’s life lurches from one mishap to the next, Bruegel’s painting keeps appearing to him as a fateful riddle he needs to solve.

About the author

Daniel Petr born 1975, studied Czech and History in Ústí and Labem and Slavonic Studies in Leipzig; a regular contributor to magazines, he has also published the novella Příběh z české mládeže (A Story of Czech Youth, 2005) and the novel Díra (The Hole, 2012).