Wind, darkness, presence

At the end of the nineties, an author with a completely unique style entered the Czech literary scene – Václav Kahuda (born 1965 in Prague). In a relatively short time, he produced a series of books, each of which became a major literary event. Kahuda pays homage to his role models – masterful storytellers like Bruno Schulz, Bohumil Hrabal, and Günter Grass. Like them, he is a master of deep dives into the depths of the soul. And just like them, he mixes the high with the low, the grotesque with the tragic, and the animalistic with the spiritual with remarkable ease. The pinnacle of his work is the autobiographical novel Houština (Petrov, Brno, 1999), which is utterly unique in the context of Czech prose. After that, Václav Kahuda fell silent for ten years because, as he himself states, he had said everything he needed to. Now, he returns to the scene with a novel that formally follows on from Houština, both in its autobiographical tone and in Kahuda’s typically corporeal, linguistically rich narrative style. The theme, however, is new. In the first chapter, the narrator decides to get to the bottom of a long-past family event from the forties, when his grandfather, an engineer and talented designer at the then ČKD, was taken by members of the German secret police somewhere in the Reich, where they tried to force him to cooperate. After refusing several times, he returns home safely, but the next morning he dies inexplicably in his flat. The narrator's journey through Czech and German archives is not rewarded with a clear explanation. Instead, it opens up an excursion into the behind-the-scenes workings of power structures, complemented by a baroque, colourful mosaic of purely private and global-economic events that together form a difficult picture of our present day.