Scattered words

Román o posledních letech Karla Poláčka Rozhlasová nahrávka z let 2024–2025. Knižní předlohu vydalo nakladatelství Druhé město – Martin Reiner v roce 2020. Audiokniha obsahuje i epilog, který nebyl v českém vydání knihy. The central character of this biographical novel is the journalist and writer Karel Hirsch, whose name is actually Karel Poláček. The author borrowed the name Hirsch from Poláček's novel "The Light Girl and the Reporter". The novel covers Hirsch-Poláček's life from the late 1930s until his unclear death at the end of the war. It begins with his and his companion Dora leaving Prague for the countryside, the primary reason for which is not to escape the occupying mocipans, but to escape his wife. This very entry seems to carry the slapstick grotesque with its occasional cruelty. We say goodbye to Hirsch on the death march, which was preceded by hardship in the concentration camps. Daneš has written a book packed with biographical and historical facts, often unknown, but at the same time with the knowledge that the last years of this writer's personality are accompanied by many question marks. However, it presents a coherent, coherent and essentially dramatic story and the reader will appreciate that the author has filled in the white spaces with his own imagination. (. ) You don't have to be a fan of biographical novels to recognize that Martin Danes has really done well with Scattered Words. They will be left with a pleasant feeling of unpretentious, sensitive servitude. And surely they are also the bridge that the author longs for in the afterword. Namely, that after finishing his novel, the reader should again reach for one of Karel Poláček's books. A good reminder of a good writer and his terrible fate. A good reminder that in Central Europe, the good is always only temporary and that one should not fool oneself and ruthlessly decide to leave. Just in time. - Ondřej Horák, Lidové noviny (. ) It must be said that Daneš succeeded in imitating the prose writer's speech in a unique way, and indeed one cannot help but feel that both the prose writer himself and the tradition of ironic humour and exaggeration typical of the intellectual elite of the First Republic come to life in the pages of the novel. To make it more authentic, the author used some of Poláček's texts or scenes from them. The moment of the writer's tragic death (the circumstances of which are not known, but Daneš's version is very likely) is depicted by the author through passages from the novel Vyprodáno (Sold Out), featuring Poláček's alter ego Jaroslav Štědrý. Scattered Words is a successful biographical novel, which does not slip into sentimentality, pieties or pathos even in tense moments. - Erik Gilk, A2