Original title: Uprostřed nocí zpěv
Genre: novel
Publisher:
Atlantis 1992, Druhé město 2010
ISBN: 80-7108-029-2
Pages: 168
Awards:
Czech Booksellers’ Prize 1993; Prize of the Literární noviny journal 1993
Foreign editions:
Spanish (Anaya, 1992, Clara Janés; Impedimenta, 2010, Patricia Gonzalo de Jesús), German (Rowohlt, 1996, Susanna Roth, Kathrin Liedtke), French (Gallimard, 1999, Nathalie Zanello-Kounovsky), Italian (Edizioni Anfora, 2005, Alessandra Mura)
At the core of this novel is the autobiographical experience of a child of a post-1948 emigrant who grows up in the 1950’s Brno, surrounded by “caring” policemen and self-imposed supervisors. At the end of this structurally complex novel, two threads of plot come together in the leading motif of a search for a father – as well as for the hero’s own identity.
"Kratochvil enhances the fragile poetic of a Bohumil Hrabal with the rough churlishness of a Günter Grass; he combines the cynicism of a Milan Kundera with the dreaming of a Bruno Schulz."
Andreas Breitenstein, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland
