Original title: Doktor Kott přemítá
Genre: short stories
Publisher:
Petrov 2002, Druhé město 2010
ISBN: 80-7227-122-9
Pages: 174
Foreign editions:
Bulgarian (Colibri, 2005, Anželina Penčeva and Vladimir Penčev), Serbian (Liberland Art, 2022, Alexandra Cimpl Simeonović)
Book containing twelve short stories on the imperfection of human relationships, the main motif of which is the contrast between banal reality and the world of dreams and imagination peopled by ourselves and others. The author tells her stories in sober language, but the seeming simplicity of the narration reveals a very keen observational talent and an ability to describe existential realities in very few words.
"With its precise understanding of life and the human relationships around us, this is, in my opinion, an authentic description of life in contemporary Czech society with unusually wide resonance. These short stories could be translated into various foreign languages and draw the reader’s attention through the purity of their universally applicable humanity. Since the fall of the communist regime in 1989, a special kind of reality has emerged within Czech society which bears some signs of the past era of totalitarianism, however strongly modified, as well as brand new phenomena showing the hovering of Czech society between its former belonging to the communist East and today´s strengthening relations with the West. The short stories of Irena Dousková bear an extraordinary witness to this transitory period of our present."
Jan Čulík, Britské listy
