Turquoise Eagle

This volume contains the novels White Ants / Bílí mravenci  and Zeno’s Paradoxes / Zénonovy paradoxy, both of which succeed in carrying the reader away to worlds that are different, strange, unusually interesting and attractive, and which reach beneath the surface of everyday life.
The narrator encounters people who tell him life stories beyond the bounds of our experience, thus creating a space for adventure. In White Ants indecipherable motifs, such as disturbing sounds, the melody of an unknown musical instrument, an ancient script or a strange type of ant are all sources of anxiety.
In Zeno´s Paradoxes, life is also reflected as a confusion of oppressive games. A student of philosophy here recounts a hallucinatory story about a city located in the middle of the ocean, populated by gods and demons.

Annotation for the second edition (2021):

Two novellas in which a man walks through the streets of Prague, encountering strangers and listening to their stories – about a perished civilization in India, ants that create living sculptures, a flavoursome script, a musical instrument made from armadillo bones, the adventurous life of a close Prostějov relation of Edmund Husserl, a mosaic at a villa in Hodkovičky that features a white tiger with green eyes, a writer whose life is changed by the discovery of mysterious keys on a typewriter, a city rising from the sea and its goddess, the unhappy love life of a water-organ tuner, a turquoise eagle, a remarkable Australian bird, an underwater building made of pearls… This book is out in a new edition with beautiful graphic design by Jana Vahalíková almost twenty-five years after it first appeared.