Double reading German/Czech

Marek Torčík: Rozložíš paměť, Paseka 2023

In his debut novel, Marek Torčík delves into the depths of memory to deal with painful childhood experiences: a homosexual boy with a slight build grows up in a small Czech industrial town. He is severely bullied at school, but finds no safe place at home. His father has left the family and his mother, a poorly paid factory worker, is taking care of her own father, an alcoholic who is nearing the end of his life. A ray of hope amidst the bleakness of small-town life is the friendship that the protagonist forms with a Roma classmate named Marian, which later develops into a romantic relationship. In the novel Memory Burn, Marek Torčík not only describes people living on the margins of society in a convincing, differentiated and precise way, but also suggests how one can free oneself from negative childhood memories. It’s not just a raw statement that overwhelms the reader, but a successful attempt to define what autofiction is most about – the step from the individual to the common in us The delicate debut is the first attempt to transfer themes from world literature to the Czech context. Stylistically, too, it can easily be compared with the work of authors such as Ocean Vuong or Édouard Louis.

Elsa Aids: Přípravy na všechno Prepare for everything From the Czech by Susa Wolfrum, Parassitenpresse 2024

Prepare for anything is a love story from a small country where life in familiar settings is slowly becoming a state of emergency. Consumerism is taken to extremes, people can no longer form real bonds and some people are preparing for the end of the world. And the first-person narrator is right in the middle of it all, somehow shimmying his way through life. He observes everything closely, sometimes he writes poetry – and his text increasingly turns into an extraordinary and clever social analysis.
This volume of prose, which also includes several poems, was written in 2018 and 2019, when a populist government was in power in the Czech Republic, against which many people in Prague had strong reservations. The feeling of resignation, alienation and the impossibility of doing anything about the situation was already widespread at the time, but the developments of recent years have only made the text even more topical. Almost everyone is happy about discounts and sales on New Year’s Eve. But what if our lives are also on sale? What if almost nobody wants us anymore, even though we are on sale? Aids’ book offers an unsparing look at the current Czech reality.

Moderation Libuše Černá

In cooperation with the Czech Literature Center
and the GALERIE am schwarzen meer