Strange accidents and terrifying incidents in the Czech countryside. A village novel one wants to read in the safe embrace of the city.

Husband and wife Bohumil and Bohumila, together with their mentally disabled son, move from Prague to a small village in the borderlands to work out their marital crisis. In the searing summer heat, they try to fit in among the locals; at first, they blame minor misunderstandings on their strangeness and lack of capacity to understand the social codes of the village. The sense of danger grows, though, as the lies, small and big, the “accidents”, and the scary incidents all start piling up. Then, one night, Bohumil and Bohumila come home to find the house empty: their son is gone. The series of uncanny events culminates on the third day after the boy’s disappearance when all the villagers gather outside the couple’s cottage in festive costumes. Did the local country bumpkins’ bizarre game turn into some perverse, modern folklore ritual? Are the lives of Bohumil and Bohumila in danger? And what has happened to their son?

]]> https://www.czechlit.cz/en/book/cestou-spendliku-nebo-jehel-en/feed/ 0 https://www.czechlit.cz/en/book/ted-nez-doctes-tuto-vetu-narodi-se-na-zemi-21-deti-en/ https://www.czechlit.cz/en/book/ted-nez-doctes-tuto-vetu-narodi-se-na-zemi-21-deti-en/#comments Tue, 20 Feb 2024 12:38:31 +0000 CzechLit https://www.czechlit.cz/book/ This pictorial and textual meditation on the meaning of time is based on the Einsteinian principle that our perception of time is... ]]>

This pictorial and textual meditation on the meaning of time is based on the Einsteinian principle that our perception of time is relative. And yet each of us is faced with the challenge of making sense of it.

Subtitled By the Time You’ve Read This Sentence, 21 Children will Have Come into the World, this lavish paperback is not merely an encyclopaedia of data about the quantity which mysteriously gives everything on Earth a fourth dimension, including memory and the stamp of impermanence. There is astonishing ingenuity behind David Böhm’s conceptual approach to the illustrated reference book, which he has already successfully employed in his previous books exploring the functioning of the head, modern urban planning and the role of Antarctica in our planet’s ecosystem.

In Now Böhm introduces older school-age readers to the variable length of time and its influence on our inner selves, poses philosophical questions about its purpose and also teaches us to allow ourselves moments of meaningful boredom within that relativity, while time continues to flow steadily on, driven by laws it is not necessary – or perhaps even advisable – for us to know about. The pace at which the book examines its subject is no less dynamic. Fun facts in the style of Dorling Kindersley alternate with collages and comic strips; a section in the form of a diary is followed by a striking visual call to action – in part an ecological one, so that we will still have something to measure with our timepieces in the future.
Age 9+

This Bologna Ragazzi Award-winning “manual of urbanism for beginners” uses images of a giant paper model of a city to show young adults how to view our cities critically and how to develop an intense relationship with our immediate surroundings.

The art of urban planning and facilitating the coexistence of city-dwellers is not an example of “social engineering” but rather a reflection of the age-old attempt to create a functioning polis. Today – when this type of settlement has come to dominate the globe – urban conservation in Central and Eastern Europe faces challenges from the historical burden of communist architecture, but also from contemporary vested interests and short-sighted attempts to patch things up. However, the place we live in deserves a better deal. Together with two award-winning artists, architect Osamu Okamura discusses possible cures for neuralgic points in our human anthills in a clear, understandable and considered manner. Thanks to “learning through play” in the form of dozens of visual jokes, he puts the problem into the necessary context – after all, if cities are to avoid degenerating into backdrops for dystopian science fiction, a consensual approach is needed.

Age 12+

About the authors:

Osamu Okamura (1973) is an architect, dean and lecturer at the Faculty of Art and Architecture of the Technical University in Liberec, chair of the Prague City Council Commission for Art in the Public Space, and a member of the Commission for the Development of Town Planning, Architecture and the Public Space of Prague 7 City Council Authority. As a member of the board of the Czech Architecture Foundation and with support from a Fulbright-Masaryk scholarship, he spent time in 2018 studying at the Chicago Architecture Center, where among other things he focused on programmes for children and young adults.

David Böhm (1982) is an artist and author of illustrated children’s books. His collection of comic-strip tales from Africa, Ticho hrocha (The Silence of the Hippo, 2009) won 2nd place in the competition for the Most Beautiful Czech Books of the Year. He also had success with the publication Hlava v hlavě (The Head in the Head, 2013): an encyclopaedic fount of knowledge with imaginative artistic and technical explanations of the functioning of the head perched on our necks (Most Beautiful Czech Books of the Year, 2014 Magnesia Litera Award, with the poet Ondřej Buddeus). He is the author of A jako Antarktida (A is for Antarctica, 2019), which won, among others, the 2020 German Children’s Literature Award in the non-fiction category.

Jiří Franta (1978) has been drawing and painting his whole life. His main interest is drawing but he also often creates installations, sculpture and videos. He is a member of the Rafani group, part of the artistic duo Franta–Böhm, and co-founder of the comics magazine KIX. He has exhibited in the Czech Republic and abroad, and has been a finalist on several occasions at the prestigious Jindřich Chalupecký Award.

A novel about the life of the scholar, man of letters, priest and educator Bohuslav Balbín (1621–1688).

Stanislav Komárek chose an unusual subject for his fourth novel: Bohuslav Balbín. This versatile Baroque intellectual, historian and hagiographer, teacher and writer, who was a defender and promoter of the Czech language long before the National Revival of the 18th and 19th centuries, has quite a lot in common with Komárek. This is probably the first reason why the author’s latest work of prose is so successful: Komárek has a genuine fondness for his character and considers Balbín his partner. And so the period following the Battle of White Mountain, often referred to as an age of darkness, is suddenly an age of light. An era when things were happening; when people were suffering from terrible poverty and the pain and destruction of war but at the same time great strides were being made in language, education, culture and history. And since Komárek is writing a work of fiction, he creatively develops a number of motifs in his own way: Balbín the forerunner of the Scout movement, Balbín the rambler, Balbín the practitioner of homoeroticism. And always with narrative gusto and verve, always with a flair for comical language and situations, with an inventive metaphor at virtually every turn. This is the second reason why his novel works so well. And the third reason is the author’s natural ability to span borders or bring together different threads, whether in terms of geography (from exile in Austria to years spent wandering the globe), disciplines (from Darwin to Jung) or genres (a writer of lyric poetry, epic poetry and drama in one). With all of this under one roof, the Jesuit Balbinus, who has been dead for more than four hundred years, suddenly comes alive.

What do the icy continent and its resilient inhabitants tell us about the comfortable existence of the rest of the globe?

Antarctica and its fauna as well as researchers and explorers are the heroes of David Böhm’s richly illustrated book. The South Pole of Roald Amundsen and his rival Robert Falcon Scott is the subject of this encyclopaedia-style popular science book which looks at Antarctica’s unforgiving climate, inaccessibility, potential for exploration and interconnectedness with the global ecosystem. The use of mixed media, with the incorporation of old maps and photographs, ensures the book is lively and varied.

The most important things to come from close friendships in a collection by the north-Bohemian underground bard.

The fourth book of poetry by the current enfant terrible of Czech poetry, Daniel Hradecký, is made up of three sections / separate compositions. In the ironic introductory “Editing the perfect poem”, the author focuses on literary language through the eyes of a poetry editor. The composition “Přibližování dřeva” (Yarding Wood) evokes the author’s encounters with various people whose speech and life experiences create images in the book that will linger in the mind forever. The closing “Raussig” – referring to the German name for the Czech city Ústí nad Labem (Aussig) – is dedicated with affectionate hatred to the author’s hometown and the landscape of north Bohemia.

A book of two storylines that eventually interconnect, together with the fates of two individuals who could not be more distant from one another – a father and daughter.

Alena Mornštajnová, a novelist who excels in capturing the complexity of human relationships, brings us another sweeping family history bound up with the 20th-century history of the Czech lands. This time she focuses on the difficulties of the father-daughter relationship and how it develops. In the narrative prose Years of Silence this is illustrated using the example of an introverted girl called Bohdana who lives with her surly father and the kind-hearted, submissive Běla – it is hardly surprising that this combination gives rise to tension. The novel’s chapters, speakers and time frames alternate – the parallel story of the staunch communist Svatopluk Žák, Bohdana’s father, is an example of the socialist illusion of a planned future. This powerful, intimate novel with an enigmatic atmosphere culminates at the moment when the two storylines intersect.

A fascinating story about a ballerina’s disillusionment in the bohemian atmosphere of 1990’s Prague.

This fictional diary of a young student dancer at a conservatory not only uncovers the world of ballet schools, dormitories, cut-throat competition and complete exhaustion, but also Prague in the 1990s with its nightclubs, drugs and sexual experimentation. Ballet Dancers, though, focuses more on “old style” classical dancing, an outdated method which should have been discarded a long time ago: destroying the individual through drills and humiliation in the quest for robotically perfect creatures for whom failure is not an option, and whose body does not even belong to them. The director and ballet dancer Miřenka Čechová draws from her own experiences and diary entries with a fine sense of uncompromising self-irony.

A taut road trip from the Czech borderlands about the search for locations for a film of life.

Veronika Bendová’s novella is situated in the unwelcoming environment of the resettled Sudetenland in north Bohemia, devastated by brown-coal mining and heavy industry. The story plays out over a short span on three levels: a romantic relationship, a detective mystery, and a higher level where the central role is played by the landscape rather than a character. Two colleagues, Hugo and Irena, are scouting for a film location for a new TV series in this gloomy region which has been “depleted” on all fronts – including the artistic one – but they discover unexpected magic amongst the brown-coal corruption.

A novelistic image of an ordinary middle-aged woman who has to start over.

Jiří Hájíček’s ninth novel describes over twelve chapters the story of a university professor approaching fifty whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. Her only child has now grown up, she is estranged from her sister, her parents have to be looked after and she is beginning a new life in South Bohemia – an environment which is emblematic for Hájíček. He once again demonstrates his strengths as a character writer and expert on female qualities. The reader sympathises with the main character, Marie, due to her realism and sense of irony. The aim of the novel is not only to describe the romances of an abandoned middle-aged woman, but to show readers that even a wearisome, lonely, difficult, though mainly ordinary life is worthy of a novelist’s attention.