Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Love Letter in Cuneiform
Set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and the 1990s, Tomáš Zmeškal’s stimulating novel focuses on one family’s tragic story of love and the unspoken. Josef meets his wife, Kveta, before the Second World War at a public lecture on Hittite culture. Kveta chooses to marry Josef over their mutual friend Hynek, but when her husband is later arrested and imprisoned for an unnamed crime, Kveta gives herself to Hynek in return for help and advice. The author explores the complexities of what is not spoken, what cannot be said, the repercussions of silence after an ordeal, the absurdity of forgotten pain, and what it is to be an outsider. In Zmeškal’s tale, told not chronologically but rather as a mosaic of events, time progresses unevenly and unpredictably, as does one’s understanding. The saga belongs to a particular family, but it also exposes the larger, ongoing struggle of postcommunist Eastern Europe to come to terms with suffering when catharsis is denied. Reporting from a fresh, multicultural perspective, Zmeškal makes a welcome contribution to European literature in the twenty-first century.
Az ékírásos szerelmeslevél
"1915. november 24-én a cseh nyelvész Hrozný professzor bemutatta a világnak a hettita nyelv megfejtését – és éppen ezen a napon született meg Josef Cerný. Az életét követve egyben megismerjük térségünk 20. századi történetét: börtön, kínzás, árulás, erőszak, sértődés, megbocsátás…Az egészet azonban mégsem a keserűség jellemzi, hanem a cseh íróktól megszokott csendes derű. A történelmet sem egyoldalúan ábrázolja,hanem árnyaltan, több nézőpontból, olykor szürreálisan, mégis átélhető módon.A történelmi családregény Csehszlovákiából indul és a mai Csehországba vezet, mozaikszerűen épül fel, más időszakok és távoli helyek tűnnek fel, megismerjük Josef és Kveta szerelmét, házasságát, ott állunk lányuk esküvőjén, és végül az a bizonyos, ékírással írott szerelmeslevél is megtalálja az olvasóját. A kongói apától és cseh anyától származó prágai Tomáš Zmeškal (1966) író, műfordító és angoltanár. Regénye elnyerte a rangos cseh Josef Škvorecký-díjat (2009) és az Európai Unió irodalmi díját (2011)."
East Europe
None
Respekt
None
Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life
Written between 1954 and 1957 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia’s postwar Communist regime, Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life flew in the face of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, an antiheroic novel informed by the literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky and constructed from episodes and lyrical sketches of the author and his neighbors’ everyday life in industrial north Bohemia, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural upheaval. Meditative and speculative reflections here alternate and overlap with fragmentary accounts of Josef Jedlicka’s own biography and slices of the lives of people around him, typically rendered as overheard conversations. The narrative passages range in chronology from May 1945 to the early 1950s, with sporadic leaps through time as the characters go about the business of “building a new society” and the mythology that goes with it. Due to its critical view of socialist society, Midway remained unpublished until 1966 when it emerged amid the easing of cultural control, but a complete version of this darkly comic novel did not appear in Czech until 1994.
Self Portrait in Green
'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
Posvatna Kazatelna
None
