The Bed Is Unmade (New Brno Tales)

“It really hasn’t occurred to you that we’re about to embark on a long string of foolish dreams in our never-ending coma?” the author tells us, as the first tale in his latest volume of stories draws to a close. Once again Jiří Kratochvil releases a tribute to his metropolis that is blistering magmatic, psychedelically engagé, poignant and darkly comic. It is necessary to stress that although Kratochvil’s perspective is intimately Brno-centric (he gropes and sniffs at the city of his heart with the passion of a lover!), it is also so broad as to be practically cosmic. And his narrative zoom is mobile enough to set the reader’s head spinning. The absorbed author might be viewing the global theatre through a telescope and a magnifying glass simultaneously. The threads of Kratochvil’s masterful narrative shiver with fibrous life, while the vibrant language, which is unmistakably his, enhances the realism of historical flashback and his three-dimensional tapestries; Kratochvil is a master weaver without parallel in Czech literature today. Yet Kratochvil is not without peers: on the jacket flap of the first collection of Brno Tales (2007) it is stated that he is “the Borges of Czech literature”. He might also be a blood relation of Ladislav Klíma. What is for sure, there is something absolute in Kratochvil’s narrative ‘egodeism’.  - Milan Ohnisko