Immortal Story

Jiří Kratochvil

Jiří Kratochvil: Immortal Story

Original title: Nesmrtelný příběh


Genre: novel


Publisher:

Atlantis 1997, Petrov 2005


ISBN: 80-7227-236-5


Pages: 214


Awards:

Karel Čapek Award, 1998


Foreign editions:

German (Ammann Verlag, 2000, Kathrin Liedtke and Milka Vagadayová), Slovenian (Cankarjeva Založba, 2001, Nives Vidrih), Russian (MIK, 2003, Inna Bezrukova), Croatian (Mozaik Knjiga, 2009, Renata Kuchar), Serbian (Liberland Art, 2021, Alexandra Cimpl Simeonović)

Summary


The major part of this work, the complete name of which is Immortal Story or the Life of Sonja Trocky-Sammler or the Carnival Novel, is told by the eponymous Sonja, daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest and a German woman, who was born in the first hours of the 20th century. A major part of the narrative is the story she tells of a never-realised meeting with somebody, - somebody who continues to seek her for the rest of her life, in the form of various animals. Her abilities and talents are extraordinary and her mission is anything but commonplace. She always gets very close to the great events and figures of history. Her apocrypha on the past century could be read as the memoirs of a lunatic – but Sonja is no fool. We begin to feel that it is the world that has gone mad...


Reviews

"Siamese Story and Immortal Story are so far the highest peaks of Kratochvil’s prose work. He achieves such storytelling virtuosity that it sends shivers down the spine just to see how intense the author can be …"  
Milan Jungmann, Týden

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