Case Closed jumps back and forth between a number of characters and storylines (with some overlap), moving quickly across forty short chapters. The first chapter is entirely in what appears to be chess notation — and similarly there’s a lot of quick back-and-forth repartee in the dialogue-heavy book. The novel is also full of games (including some more chess), clues, mysteries, and ambiguity.

Case Closed is — arguably — ostensibly a mystery/thriller: some crimes are committed and investigated (arson, rape, a murder from forty years ago), and one of the central characters is a policeman, chief inspector Vilém Lebeda. But this very multilayered novel is also a humorous-critical look at the Czech character and nation over the past decades, into the post-Communist present — as well as an entirely literary game.

Life in and as fiction, and philosophical quandaries (right down to the question: “Are we real?”): Ouředník piles it on thick and fast. It works — indeed, it’s tremendously appealing — because he shows such a light, deft touch. Case Closed is terribly playful, but not quite fatally so.

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“When Ouředník has had enough of his characters, he throws them out of the window or kills them in stupid accidents (one of them dies pushing an old washing machine off a cliff), which explains the mocking hysteria of the story in every sense.”

— Libération

“The Prague writer Patrik Ouředník, born in 1957 and living in France since 1984, is a master of subversion. His new novel, “Classé sans suite”, will delight fans of the genre and plunge others into perplexity, anguish, confusion, dismay and perhaps despair – all for just 9 euros!”

— Le Monde

“Ouředník offers tantalizing clues in brief chapters and alternating points of view that are endlessly, and humorously, non-intersecting; but the chain of perhaps unrelated events amounts to a gleeful skewering of the Czech national character and a character-rich, dialogue-sassy send-up colored by a lingering Communist legacy”

— Publishers Weekly

“‘Case Closed’ is a portrait of a time and place—post-Communist Prague—through language. Part of this project is showing how the author frames his reader, and in doing so Ouředník shows the same sensibility as narrator-author as the Praguers he portrays in satire. How is it that a man falling from a window, or a girl being interviewed as a rape-victim can be funny? The clue here is in the pithy, irreverent dialogue of the book’s final chapter: spoken, vernacular, ephemeral.”

— Bomb Magazine

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