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Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
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Europeana (Paperback)
Patrik Ou redn ik; Translated by Gerald Turner
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R341
Discovery Miles 3 410
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Tracing the Great War through the Millennium Bug, 1999 through
1900, Dadaism through Scientology through Sierra Leonean bicycle
riding and back, award-winning Czech author Patrik Ourednik
explores the horror and absurdity of the twentieth century in an
explosive deconstruction of historical memory.Europeana: A Brief
History of the Twentieth Century opens on the beaches of Normandy
in 1944, comparing the heights of different forces’ soldiers and
considering how tall, long, or good at fertilizing fields the
men’s bodies will be. Probing the depths of humanity and
inhumanity, this is an account of history as it has never been
told: “engaging, even frightening.” At once recreating and
uncreating the twentieth century, Ourednik explores the connections
across the decades between the disparate figures, events, and
politics we thought we knew. Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana merits
the author’s reputation as a giant of post-1989 Czech literature.
Now translated into 33 languages, the book is a masterwork of
cubism, a polymorphic monologue of statistics and movements and
fine print and discoveries that evokes the deadpan absurdity of
Kafka and the gallows humor of Hašek. Ourednik has created a
mesmerizing, maddening account of the past, and his interrogation
of “truth” and objectivity resonates now more than ever.
The end of the world is the least of the problems facing Gaspard
Boisvert, erstwhile advisor to "the stupidest American president in
history," when he discovers that he may share the genes of a
certain, infamous Austrian corporal, thanks to a dalliance on the
part of his grandmother during the First World War. Around the
hapless Gaspard's descent into amnesia and anti-social rebellion,
an obsessive-compulsive narrator assembles 111 pithy chapters
linked by the ultimate theme of all: the coming apocalypse. In this
deadpan anti-novel, statistics and historical data are marshalled,
and the divagations range over subjects as various as the history
of religions, Viagra, vegetarianism and dietary taboos, aerial
bombing, the Maltese national anthem, categories of suicide,
varieties of stupidity, bathtubs, the critical density of the
universe, pork and pigmen, and the etymology of the name Adolf.
The nineteenth-century founding of "free settlements" in the
Americas serves as a starting point for the new novel by popular
Czech author Patrik Ouredn?k. Simultaneously satiric and
philosophical, "The Opportune Moment, 1855," opens with an Italian
anarchist's missive to his noble former mistress, an impassioned
rejection of all of Europe's latest and greatest advancements, from
the Enlightenment to social reform to communist revolution. We then
leap back in time half a century to the alternately somber and
hilarious shipboard diary of a common Italian everyman sailing to
Brazil with a motley, multinational band of idealists, to build a
new society. A pitiless portrait of the often unbridgeable gap
between theory and practice, "The Opportune Moment, 1855" is
another uproarious and unsettling attack on convention by one of
literature's great provocateurs.
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Case Closed (Paperback)
Patrik Ou redn ik; Translated by Alex Zucker
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R266
Discovery Miles 2 660
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Centered on an elderly retiree and his intellectual adversary, the
shrewd Inspector Lebeda, "Case Closed" is filled with all the
expected elements of a thriller--murder, rape, suicide!--but soon
reveals itself as a wily and sophisticated parable about the
dangers of language itself, in which the author takes aim at human
nature with a devastating arsenal of genre-mixing, wordplay, and
whimsical, biting satire.
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