In the Name of the Father

V mene otca
Slovaška
Balla-150x150.jpg.pagespeed.ce.j-Z8lx66Jd
Balla
I don’t understand why I should give preference to a person, just because he is my son. Fine, I won’t kill him. But that’s it. To me he is a foreigner. I give a shit about sentiment, and I’m proud to do so. I didn’t see my sons for years, we didn’t talk with each other for years, all we had vanished, disappeared, evaporated, gone. Maybe they are similar to me, but is that actually a quality?

The novella V mene otca – In the Name of the Father is a probe into the life of a man of retirement age and his complicated family relationships. He is a man who is irresponsible and selfish with sadistic inclinations, the father of two adult sons who once was a son himself and is now telling his story. He has failed as a father and in his own narration he tries to ascertain the reasons. But he seeks the reason for failure mainly in other members of the family, not in himself. The impulse to narrate the story is for him the sale of the house where he lived with his own family and which his mysterious brother built. The man’s youngest son wants to get rid of the house, because the meaning of life which living in this house should have offered the family never actually existed. In the novel the author attempts to express his own view on the need or lack of need of a family as the basic cell of society, when reality compels mutually indifferent individuals to live together. The book won the prestigious Anasoft Litera Prize in 2012.

One of the most original phenomena on the contemporary Slovak literary scene, Balla is known for his absurd stories with a whole panoply of lonely, alienated and strange individuals incapable of forming relations with other human beings. The stories are often driven by conflicting family relationships, and even though we could label his outlook as pessimistic, his prose is not lacking in humour.

In 1996 he received the Ivan Krasko prize for his debut Leptokaria (1996). In 2011 he published a novella with autobiographic features In the Name of the Father. He won the prestigious Anasoft Litera prize for this book in 2012. Despite the fact that he is the holder of several other significant literary awards, he lives in secrecy, in the small town of Nové Zámky, where he works, as Franz Kafka once did, as a civil servant at the local labour office. It is interesting that in neighbouring Poland he ranks among the most read authors from Central Europe.