Original title: Vyhoření
Genre: novel
Publisher:
Host, 2023
ISBN: 978-80-275-1812-8
Pages: 130
Awards:
shortlisted for Magnesia Litera in the Prose category 2024
Novelistic pamphlet about the life of humans in a world of cars
Oscillating around the axis of polemic—novel—allegory, this text argues against fetishization of the car as a symbol of progress, independence, power and privatization of the world. All cars have an allegorical undercurrent. The narrator is a courier who delivers food around town, pedals too much, thinks as much as he pedals, and spends much of his day exchanging insults with other road users. Our delivery boy stands on one side of the barricades in the civil war of the streets. His harrowing travels through enemy territory and his implacable fight for justice (whether real or imagined) lead towards callousness and hatred.
The follow-up to Petr Šesták’s memorable novel Continuity in the Park is another work that defies the reader’s expectations. A cross between a polemic and a novel, it presents its opinions with unabashed clarity. Why should literature address a matter from all sides when this matter is unambiguous? This story of a delivery boy who brings food to the luckier and less considerate among us really gets a move on!
This work is about growing irreconcilability of antagonisms in society and its systems, amplified by technology. Are we users of technology’s tools or the tools themselves?
"An incisive novel, which demonstrates that even the pamphleteering genre can be handled in a subversive and inspiring way. Its narrator, a food-delivery bicycle courier, angrily denounces contemporary capitalist society, symbolically embodied in the automobile. He addresses his motorist adversary using a disrespectful pronoun, thus basically lashing out at every car owner. However, anger and implacability gradually eat away at the courier, and the character, who initially inspires sympathy – and whose cycling jihad seems righteous – turns into an aggressive fanatic. Šesták’s pamphlet thus becomes a multifaceted allegory that leaves more questions than clear answers. The author’s shrewd choice of a fitting genre and of an unreliable hero also avoids accusations that he is being formulaic and that the cyclist’s exclamations are emotionally manipulative – all of which can be attributed to the narrator, whose schematic view of the world Šesták sardonically criticizes."
Statement made by the Magnesia Litera panel
