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DETAIL TITULU:

The Arsonist

Twisted Spoon Press 2025

brožovaná180 str.
ISBN 9788088628101

obálka
320,-
288,-
1-2 ks

Awarded the Czechoslovak State Prize for Literature in 1936, The Arsonist explores the world of youth against the backdrop of a small eastern Bohemian border town being menaced by an invisible firebug. Time and fire, their ability to reshape and destroy, are central. Encoded in echo, wind, and smoke — in the gesture and in the whisper — the true nature of events is too intangible and fleeting, too pregnant with the unknown, to provide any genuine certainty, and this is the real source of the townsfolk's terror. Their misguided attempts to identify the elusive arsonist ultimately reveal the emptiness and inflexibility of their own lives. One of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century Czech letters, Hostovský's mix of mysticism, irony, and wit, all leavened by the influence of Expressionism on his early work, results in a richly textured narrative amid an atmosphere of growing peril that serves as a harbinger of the catastrophe to come. This is the first English translation.

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... deceptively quiet Zbečnov seethes just beneath the surface with the kind of smoldering, smothered urges eptiomized by adolescent angst. Though Hostovský doesn't reveal the firebug's face until the last chapter, this is hardly a suspense novel. The book's surface mystery story serves mostly as a mirror and backdrop for the psychological action that is its theme and emotional core. By the book's close, fire, darkness, suspicion and secrecy have twisted into a network of associations that illuminate both Kamil's troubled family and the entire town.

— The Prague Post

Hostovský produced novels that were near masterpieces.

— Arne Novák

The Arsonist is a spare, elegant meditation on unseen terror, given form in random fires within a small town in eastern Bohemia as Czech and Prussian anti-Semitism erupts.

— Literární noviny