Literary fiction | English sample translation available
This experimental novel can be seen as an allegory, a multi-genre parody, or a biblical parable as it shifts between facts, dreams and nightmares.
The novel’s powerful central plot, in an uncertain setting in time and space, focuses on a ten-year-old child from a housing estate. It is a remarkable debut, built on its expressiveness, language and the reader’s experience. The author keeps the audience guessing about what is happening in each of the characters’ minds, the exit strategy, which acts are dreams and which really take place, where the children’s sweet imaginations end and where the real horror begins. In the narrative of a boy, nicknamed Bumblebee, an unnamed dog, referred to as Com’ere, and a housing estate community of strange beings emerges a horror story. In it, the novel tells a story about adolescence, a picture of emerging madness that shifts into cruelty, an unsettling allegory of human society, a warning against neglecting children and animals, and a social probe into a dysfunctional family that appears almost idyllic from the outside. The Creation, from the start, contains a layer of references, quotations, and allusions to literature, films and plays from across different continents and centuries.
Eugen Liška Jnr (b. 1981) studied comparative literature at Charles University, as well as scriptwriting and dramaturgy at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), both in Prague. Three of his screenplays have been turned into TV movies. In addition to the first prize in Czech Television’s scriptwriting competition in 2006, Liška also won the RWE and Barrandov Studios Film Foundation Prize for his screenplay Půlnoční míle (Midnight Mile, 2010). The Creation is Liška’s debut novel.