Dark Love

Alexandra Berková

Alexandra Berková: Dark Love

Original title: Temná láska


Genre: novella


Publisher:

Petrov 2000


ISBN: 80-7227-085-0


Pages: 120


Foreign editions:

Bulgarian (Panorama Plus, 2003, Anželina Penčeva), Spanish (Bassarai, 2004, Elena Buixaderas), Slovenian (Police Dubove, 2012, Tatjana Jamnik)


Rights sold to:

Egypt (Kotob Khan)

Summary


This is the most open excursion into the author’s private life. She has not abandoned the sound and well-tried weapons that are so typical of her style – sarcasm, an emphasis on the absurd sides of reality – or the distorted glass through which she looks. The individual sections of the text are handled in various ways (the hyperbolised metaphor of living with a partner, social allegory, a paraphrasing of Dante’s Divine Comedy, to mention a few instances only...). All three segments have one thing in common and that is the psychotherapeutic dialogue between the main character – the ageing narrator Kateřina – and her doctor.
In Czech literary circles, this book is often considered the best home-produced prose work of the past ten years.


Reviews

"The narrator persistently reminds the reader of the unpleasant atmosphere of numbness within a family, the hell of relationships between partners, each with an ‘indefeasible’ claim on the other. Berková must have experienced these phenomena to the full, suffering thereby long and painfully, and her books bring out the essence of it all."
Josef Chuchma, MF Dnes

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