Ladislav Fuks

The Cremator

Trans. Eva M. Kandler
The Cremator The Cremator
Karolinum Press, 2016, 180 pp
9788024632902
Language: English
Goodreads rating
81.4% (Rated by 4964 users)

A study of the totalitarian mindset with stunning resonance for today, The Cremator is a disturbing, powerful work of literary horror.

Horror, Literary fiction

The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.” It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and pervades this tragicomic novel of anxiety and evil set amid the horrors of World War II. As a gay man living in a totalitarian, patriarchal society, noted Czech writer Ladislav Fuks identified with the tragic fate of his Jewish countrymen during the Holocaust. The Cremator arises from that shared experience. Fuks presents a grotesque, dystopian world in which a dutiful father, following the strict logic of his time, liberates the souls of his loved ones by destroying their bodies – first the dead, then the living. As we watch this very human character – a character who never ceases to believe that he is doing good – become possessed by an inhuman ideology, the evil that initially permeates the novel’s atmosphere concretizes in this familiar family man.

Karolinum Press, 2016, 180 pp
9788024632902
Language: English
Goodreads rating
81.4% (Rated by 4964 users)