A novelistic pamphlet about the life of humans in a world of cars

Literary fiction

Oscillating around the axis of polemic—novel—allegory, this text argues against the fetishization of the car as a symbol of progress, independence, power and privatization of the world. All cars have an allegorical undercurrent. The narrator is a courier who delivers food around town, pedals too much, thinks as much as he pedals, and spends much of his day exchanging insults with other road users. Our delivery boy stands on one side of the barricades in the civil war of the streets. His harrowing travels through enemy territory and his implacable fight for justice (whether real or imagined) lead towards callousness and hatred.

Petr Šesták was born in 1981 into a Czech-Jewish family in the Sudetenland of south Moravia. He is a graduate in Czech from the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague. He has written screenplays for a travel show broadcast on Czech Television and was involved in its filming in Mongolia and islands of the French West Indies. For two years, he lived in a motor home as he travelled about Europe with a mobile exhibition of photographs. His experiences of the nomadic life are captured in the poetic, philosophical travel book Kočovná galerie (A Nomad’s Gallery, 2014). His debut novel, Kontinuita parku (Continuity in the Park, 2021) received excellent reviews and resonated strongly with readers.