Original title: Narušení děje
Genre: novel
Publisher:
Host, 2024
ISBN: 978-80-275-2241-5
Pages: 285
Awards:
Shortlisted for Literary Critics Award (results to be announced on 13th March, 2025)
Literature and life have a common denominator: the story.
The protagonist of this autofictional novel is thirty-three-year-old Emma, who is trying to make sense of her Czech roots, cope with the death of her mother, and find answers about her female partner’s disappearance. History does not flow past her; it accumulates and shatters. Amid the remains, the water rises to catastrophic levels and the fires intensify. Emma scrapes a way through, hoping to distance herself from a love in which she is winner and loser. We reach the end of her narrative together or individually; the story remains. As does the question of whether telling a story can help someone come to terms with tragedy.
Emma Kausc’s first novel shows the author to be a teller of original, thoughtful, vivid stories. The text is replete with colourful imagery that demonstrate the skills of an established poet and gifted prose writer.
"The prose debut Plot Disruption has sparked a wave of unprecedented enthusiasm among critics, as an author with an extraordinary talent for writing has appeared on the scene. Her text is literally bursting with literariness. It cannot be paraphrased, and it cannot be transferred to another sign system without losing the most essential part of its qualities. This is artful writing, which is not very common in Czech literature, and that is why it looks so fresh, new and unique. The power of the text literally fills the reader with its rhythm, style and way of thinking.
(…) The novel Plot Disruption has turned out to be the literary event of the year.
(…)
In many ways, Emma Kausc’s novel world resembles a post-apocalyptic landscape in which people disappear irrevocably and without a trace. Melting glaciers, wildfires in California, crumbling concrete housing estates constantly draw attention to global environmental and social threats. However, the text can also be read as a queer novel or as a novel of the female body that wants to escape the control of the outside world. But we can also see in it a vividly told love story of lost love and carnal desire. The book is also a testament to the author’s fondness for architecture, rock music and artistic photography – a tribute to film noir and the French New Novel.
(…) Emma Kausc presents to the Czech audience a global novel set against the backdrop of the Western world, raising the problems of mankind and contemporary man that are well-known from the pages of news servers and books by contemporary world authors. The prose conveys a world in which people search in vain for the meaning of things and where the scaffolding of the grand narrative, which gave order to the world and to human life, has fallen through into some deep mole tunnel. But it is a narrative that is very complex, demanding on the reader and highly derivative in its ideas. That is also why it so powerfully conveys the spirit of the present – i.e. its intellectual sphere. I reckon the mass readership is not going to get Plot Disruption. Perhaps on purpose.
(…)
Emma Kausc has had a prominent position on the map of contemporary Czech prose since Plot Disruption was published."
Aleš Merenus, Tvar
"Despite all the compositional and communicative complexity, it is clear that the author has a firm grip on the narrative and that she is deeply informed by literary theory and world literature, including contemporary feminist-oriented prose that seeks new ways of speaking about issues of trauma, identity, corporeality and the like. (…)
It is challenging, intellectual (not just highbrow!), thoughtful, and above all completely different from the entire panorama of literature written here in the last few decades. Thank God for it."
Jan M. Heller, Tvar
"Emma Kausc has filled Plot Disruption with ten micro-stories in which she deals with people and their fates and myths. Only a naive reader would think this an overelaborate intellectual game. The novel has its order, pace and strong message. It offers hope that even “the smallest fictions can save us from disaster”."
Olga Pavlova, Host
"Emma Kausc’s brilliant novel travels through space and time from London to Iceland to burning California. The young author’s debut novel, Plot Disruption, is extraordinary in many ways.
(…)
Reading this book offers a very intense experience and is clearly beyond the context of contemporary Czech prose, the way it works with autofiction and other distinctive motifs, the narrative mastery and not least, the absence of schematicity. As a result, the novel is discussed in literary circles as one of the best books published in the Czech Republic in recent times.
(…)
The narrative spills out in many directions, some parts seem disjointed, but as the pages go on we discover how well thought out this debut is.
(…)
Emma Kausc has an undeniable sense of word and rhythm, skilfully weaving together several narrative lines and to an appropriate extent incorporating reflective passages, remarkable in themselves, into Emma’s story.
(…)
This is a book written with a mastery rarely seen in domestic prose, even in titles by seasoned novelists and fiction writers."
Kryštof Eder, Deník N
