The Fifth Boat
A tale of twelve-year-old Jarka who lives with her very young mother in the suburbs, a woman with little interest in being a mother and only a teenager herself when her daughter was born. Given neither love nor attention, Jarka must look after herself and spends many long hours alone in her flat or wandering aimlessly around the […]
The Last Horse of Pompeii
Posledný kôň Pompejí – The Last Horse of Pompeii is a narration about the Central European identity confronted with the contemporary world reality. The book is playful, witty, with dark humor, a sad account of the world we live in. As in some of his previous books, Vilikovský unmasks mythicised features of Slovak nation. The narrator of the story, […]
The ornament
Ornament – The ornament: The story of a student, Matej Hóz, takes place in the 1950s in the days of persecution of Christians by the communist régime. Matej billets a priest hiding from the state police in his apartment. They form a strange friendship, which remains the central theme of the story even after the priest disappears, […]
Reason
Sloboda‘s prose writing has strong autobiographical features. The author, nearly always, describes his own experience and workings of his mind in his prose writing: he focuses on the search for the meaning of life and on the attitudes of an individual in an estranged society. Rozum – Reason brings out a story of an intellectual, engaged in […]
The Unwritten Novel
Nenapísaný roman – The Unwritten Novel is a prose work about a non-assertive intellectual, set in the 1970s. The protagonist, Adam Zachariáš, is a type of an anti-hero. The communist regime persecutes him, but not to that extent he would make it the main topic of his „notes“ for a novel. Zachariáš realizes that behind every ban […]
The End of the Game
The End of the Game – Koniec hry 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 […]
The Lamp
Lampa – The Lamp is an ambitious project, combining several traditional types of novel: a road novel, an educational novel, a social novel. It brings forth a skeptical polemic with “great stories”: a Christian story of the “history of salvation”, a socialist story of emancipation of the working-class man, a story of “liberation” based on the belief in the […]
Mark the Horse Groom and the Pope of Hungary
The sparse plot of a historical novel Marek koniar a uhorský pápež – Mark the Horse Groom and the Pope of Hungary is set in 16th century, in the times of the Dózsa uprising. The author writes about the powerful men of this world who yearn for even more power and who do not hesitate to use any beguiling means […]
Dogs Marry
The novel Psy sa ženia – Dogs Marry offers an interesting and bold insight into our contemporary reality. A suspenseful story about the private life of a writer coming to a small town to do research for his next prose work deals with the unclear and insincere relationships within the society. It probes the borders of funny and serious, and […]
The Assistant
The story of Pomocnik – The Assistant takes place in a small township of Palánk in southern Slovakia, recovering after the trauma of WWII. The residents of Palánk do not dwell on the past, they fix their attention to the future. Life bursts out in this small town with all its might, tastes, colours and passion. The need to […]