(The Arsonist)
Czech State Award for Literature 1936

About the Book
Original Title | Žhář |
First Published | 1935 |
Publisher | Melantrich, Prague |
Pages | 181 |
Rights Sold
USA | Twisted Spoon – Prague |
The Netherlands | Zirmiri – Amsterdam |
Zbečnov, 1935. Life in the border town in the mountains of eastern Bohemia goes about its routine. Everyone is minding their own business: Josef Simon runs The Silver Pigeon, the inn and regular pub of a motley clientele, his enigmatic wife longs for her birthplace, and their two adolescent children Eliška and Kamil struggle with the constraints of their age. But everything changes with a series of unexplained fires. Who on earth is this arsonist? Every day this question echoes in the Silver Pigeon. The fires increasingly arouse suspicion among the residents and bring up repressed emotions. In an increasingly grim atmosphere, the saying “small town, big hell” turns out to be entirely true.
Egon Hostovský develops a suffocating plot, steeped in the uneasiness of the interwar period. The envy, mistrust between Czechs, Germans and Jews, and references to political radical ideologies become a clear and shocking omen of the tragedy that would unfold a few years later.
‘The Arsonist’ is sharp and gripping, and at the same time not written without fine humour.
“Wonderful literature, sharp and poignant, and at the same time written not without fine humour. I savoured it. ”
— Boekensite Gent
“‘The Arsonist’ is a spare, elegant meditation on unseen terror, given form in random fires within a small town in eastern Bohemia as Czech and Prussian anti-Semitism erupts.”
— Literární noviny
“The book’s surface mystery story serves mostly as a mirror and backdrop for the psychological action that is its theme and emotional core. By the book’s close, fire, darkness, suspicion and secrecy have twisted into a network of associations that illuminate both Kamil’s troubled family and the entire town.”
— The Prague Post
Translations


The Arsonist
Twisted Spoon, Prague, 1995
Translated by Christopher Morris
De brandstichter
Zirimiri, Amsterdam, 2024
Translated by Edgar de Bruin