A Bear’s Novel

Jiří Kratochvil

Jiří Kratochvil: A Bear’s Novel

Original title: Medvědí román


Genre: novel


Publisher:

Atlantis 1990


ISBN: 80-7108-010-1


Pages: 266


Awards:

Tom Stoppard Award, 1991

Summary


The samizdat edition of this work, which consists of three parts and an epilogue, raised an uproar in the mid 1980’s. The individual parts deal with different topics and have different narrators. Gradually, especially in the epilogue, what unifies these three stories comes to the surface, as does their relation to one another and complicated reflections; a possible key to the interpretation of the three faces of a single novel is offered to the patient reader. In this work, Kratochvil presents his poetic style of writing a novel as an open system.


Reviews

"Thanks to the originality of its narrative structure, the importance of its statements referring to the Czech world of the recent past, and to the quality of its literary language, A Bear’s Novel is definitely one of the most precious works published since November 1989 in the Czech Republic."  
Květoslav Chvatík, Tvar

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