Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you are into contemporary fiction here are some contemporary fiction books from Czech Republic for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud e... continue
Ivan Klima has created a remarkable portrayal of a woman striving to be both lover and mother, to unravel her father's secret past, and to protect her daughter in the nihilist present. Both a striking statement on the universal struggle between parents and children and a portrait of the chaos as a newly free society attempts to define itself.
The suicide of a wealthy elderly man soon proves to be improbable. The perceptive policeman tirelessly searches for the real reasons for the strange death, which will lead him to the mysterious house under Petrin. The mysteries and motives increase as the hours spent with the young widow increase. The main characters are three, perhaps four women, educated, bold and devoted to a higher justice, according to which the victim and the culprit lose their original duality. And the burning question echoes: how much more violence and wars await us before all this human misfortune finally becomes huma... continue
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.