The End of the Game

Koniec hry
Slovakia
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Dušan Mitana
No, he cannot trust anyone any longer, not even his own mother. He must rely solely on himself; he should have relied solely on himself from the very beginning. He should have done what he originally wanted to do and what his mother had prevented him from doing – he should have admitted, immediately, yes, he should have admitted that he had been at home, but that Helena had already been dead.

The End of the Game is a psychological novel with a suspense plot deals with the problem of crime and punishment, with both the individual and collective morals of the society in the last decade of socialism in the 1980s. A film director murders his wife in affect, but his mother saves him by pleading guilty and accepting the sentence instead of her son. The game is not over, though… The story is boldly set in real environment of Bratislava artistic circles of those times.

Dušan Mitana (1946 - 2019) was a novelist, screenwriter, and film and television literary adviser who devoted his professional life to writing literature. He was one of the first Slovak authors to write experimental, postmodernist prose. From the beginning of his writing career he showed himself to be a gifted storyteller. In his works he depicts the farcical nature of situations in life, but also human existence as an absurdity and life as a sequence of chance events. He fluently mingles the rational with elements of fantasy, the normal with the pathological or the everyday with the bizarre, thus making even ordinary stories fascinating reading, often with unexpected turns of events and conclusions.

Dušan Mitana is one of the first writers of experimental post-modern prose in Slovak literature, boldly entering the literary scene in the 1970s.