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 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)
Novelist, script writer, film and television literary adviser, he devotes his time professionally 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.
The sociocritical novel Koniec hry/The End of the Game (1984) gives the impression of being a criticism of the moral state of society in the last decades of the totalitarian regime as well as a psychological novel with a detective plotline. The protagonist, television director Peter Slávik, kills his wife because he is not able to come to terms with her different view of the world. The author daringly lends his story a real-life setting in Bratislava’s artistic community, to which he holds up a distorting mirror.
Dušan Mitana is one of the first writers of experimental post-modern prose in Slovak literature, boldly entering the literary scene in the 1970s.
