“With psychological insight that rivals Dostoevsky’s great novels, the twenty-one linked narratives in this collection present us with ordinary people, with ordinary problems — and teach us to love and respect the former, and bear the latter.

All of us sometimes finds oneself in a situation that suddenly upsets everything we have been through, and an unknown world opens up before us. And it is at such turning points that we find the heroes of Balabán’s stories, Oldřich suffering from a morbid fear of birds, Edita leaving her husband and abandoned by her lover, patients in an alcohol treatment centre and many others.

There is none of the obnoxious writer’s nonchalance in these texts, with which one simply writes about anything, hoping that the author’s message to the reader will somehow work itself out of the piled-up words. But they also lack the same obnoxious over-symbolization that offers the author’s message up front, as it were, and makes the characters and plots nothing more than rigid allegories. The people in Balabán’s stories actually “live for a while,” talking together, asking questions, not rushing headlong to catharsis, attentive to ordinary events and images that have yet to become urgent signs. Signs that will help to recognize whether a person has truly lived in his or her destiny – if only for a moment.

“Balabán’s stories are a litany of the sadness and pointlessness of life, of relationships, even of memories: of violent lovers’ quarrels; of people who, at the very point of closeness, shun the moment of intimacy that could bring happiness, change their lives; of parents, whose relationship with their children is put at risk the moment the unexpected comes along.”

— Eurolitnetwork

“With a touch of blues-like sadness, Balabán portrays modern people in crisis (alcohol, marital problems, loneliness, etc.). His stories are compact, avoiding long openings. The reader meets the characters on a walk in the mountains, during a talk with their partner, or wasting a night in a bar.”

— Body

Translations