Plot Disruption

Emma Kausc

Emma Kausc: Plot Disruption

Original title: Narušení děje


Genre: novel


Publisher:

Host, 2024


ISBN: 978-80-275-2241-5


Pages: 285


Awards:

Literary Critics Award 2025; longlisted for the Magnesia Litera – Luxor Litera for prose (2025)


Rights sold to:

Switzerland (Zeitkind, German rights), Tanmia Publishing (Egypt)

Summary


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. 
 


Reviews

"With extraordinary self-confidence, Plot Disruption deliberately and knowingly teeters on the edge of literary exhibitionism. In associatively linked, intertwining plot lines, interspersed with essayistic passages, the author explores the nature of her own memory and the potential of narrative. It deals with personal and social matters, the war in Ukraine, LGBTQ+ issues, the climate crisis and more, while moving confidently in various environments and locations around the world, such as London, the USA and Iceland."

Statement by the Magnesia Litera jury

 

"Another novel has appeared on the Czech book market, which the publisher has “decorated” with the attribute of autofiction. However, it would be a shame to relegate Plot Disruption, Emma Kausc’s first prose work, to join the many contemporary texts in which we look for similarities with the lives of authors and whose “authenticity” we are sweetly tempted by. If the term “postmodern” were still in vogue, I would resort to it much more readily and without shame. I would try to understand in what direction erstwhile (1990s) efforts to work with storytelling have moved in the third decade of the twenty-first century, in this globally interconnected age of technology. In fact, I have the impression that the author is more committed to the tradition of storytelling than to autobiography (despite the fact that she also names her protagonist Emma), and to stories firmly set in a contemporary socio-cultural-geographical framework.

In its prologue and epilogue, Plot Disruption is framed by the story of London madman William “Moleman” Lyttle, who excavates intricate underground passages beneath his house. It sounds like a bizarre obsession (I thought of Kamil Modráček in Kratochvil’s The Promise / Slib), yet it can also be seen as a metaphor for the novel’s structure throughout this book: the author digs furiously underground, eventually emerging in an unexpected room – and the tectonics of the world have been disrupted.

“Our lives no longer feel like stories,” the Mole says in the prologue, and the author then turns the word “story” over on all sides throughout the novel, searching for what it should actually mean. Her approach is digressive, associative, and the novel does not really hold together in the classic sense of the word “together”, as its bond seems to be primarily the feeling of a contemporary (young) person searching for his or her place in the world, more than any kind of concise narrative.

Thirty-three-year-old Emma lives in London, the child of Czech immigrants, rootless and slightly lost, but at the same time she does not experience her lostness in any deep, explicit way – rather, we sense it very much from the way she searches for the story (or stories). The author postulates for a long time, constructing her fictional world, presenting sketches of characters and their fates, preparing for the reader an often unrelated mosaic of destinies, which is fragmentary, moving in leaps and bounds, diving into partial memories. Its literary construction is somehow clip-like, alluding to the mediality of the contemporary world. Unlike her postmodern predecessors, she draws inspiration not only from literature but also from various kinds of art. She presents a series of short insights, eloquent images and self-referential writings. From the first sections of the opening chapter, her trust in the recipients, in their willingness or ability to be guided by her associative flow, is evident. In addition to a number of artistic and geographical realities, the stories of the main characters give us our bearings within the novel, as well as the recurrent and varied motif of space and time. There are very few principal characters in the novel: some are associated with certain parts of the book, others pass through, and these are by and large the most important. The first of these is Zuzana, Emma’s mother, an emigrant who never adopted the language of her new homeland. She has recently died, and Emma is coming to terms with both her departure and the legacy, and indeed the traumas that no relationship with her parents seems to be without.  Kausc does not blame them. She does not refer to them accusingly, but rather naturally, by the way, as a matter that we all deal with. She neither tries to emphasize the traumas nor to embellish herself with them in any way; rather they smoulder beneath the surface and emerge in individual situations, latently; in the first part of the book at least they do not form a key theme.

The second central character is Alyona, a photographer, Emma’s partner, who one day disappears from her life. The novel is thus a search for her departed mother, but also a search for a former love: these two pivotal yet so very different women have left Emma’s life. She had a different relationship with each of them, but both of them marked her, for better and for worse. While both Zuzana and Alyona have left Emma’s life, they never disappear from the novel; their micro-stories emerge at all moments, and the description of the love affair with Alyona in the opening chapters is one of the strongest elements in the entire work.

This dark, somehow “murky” beginning gradually becomes everyday; the plot after the middle is taken over by the actress Sára, and her relationship with the writer John takes centre stage. Later Anne, Emma’s other partner, appears. To complete the tangle of relationships – John eventually ends up in a relationship with Emma. The fatality of Alyona’s love is eventually replaced by the somewhat idealized relationship between the two literati and a parallel relationship with Anne, a “socialite”.

Despite the fact that the game is all about finding the meaning of the story – the plot is not really the main point at all. For example, it is much more suspenseful to observe her work with time mentioned above. The characters repeatedly come back to a distinctive London location, the Greenwich Meridian, a point where time literally materializes. The author is constantly jumping around in time, and Alyona’s disappearance is revealed to us at the very beginning. Although time clearly cannot be mastered (and some characters, such as Zuzana, de facto “freeze” in time), literary time is a free variable, and Kausc treats it as such. Time brings loss into human life: Plot Disruption is a book of loss (and that is why the final discovery of love feels somewhat inorganic, or rather simplistic). The cyclical structure is reinforced by repeated returns to a single moment; Kausc retells it again and again, with varying detail, in a way that shifts the story’s action elsewhere. This approach literally makes the work a situational novel – alongside the series of descriptions of artworks and various locations, alongside the series of reflections, we find numerous isolated, vividly rendered situations. In Plot Disruption, the author juxtaposes these approaches to storytelling without placing particular emphasis on any one of them.

Likewise, some sentences and individual messages, besides those related to the story, as well as various pieces of wisdom and personal mottos are repeated refrain-like, just as we, too, keep coming back to our favourite quotes and tried-and-tested tenets throughout our lifetime. This spiral motion of the motifs (for example, relating to Zuzana, “I often measured the distance between you and any disaster”) brings a sense of security and functional coherence, while appearing to be a gesture of authorial reassurance.

Although the author’s writing is very fragmentary and mosaic-like, such returns create an impression of “verisimilitude”. For the reader, returning can mean an almost corporeal experience of reading; returning to the same sentence or idea can make one pause, tear one away – and in this, I think, the author creates a work that can affect the reader almost bodily. It’s not just about intense feelings (death, love and the like), but also about the weather inscribing itself on the body, about the architecture, and ultimately the experience of another work of art. Kausc works with this motif very thoughtfully and the individual chapters highlight different artistic disciplines.

Alyona is a photographer – her visual perception of the world informs the language of the first chapters of the book, and the imagery associated with it is very powerful. The author puts a similar emphasis on the description of the art installations and works; they help us find our bearings in the world and create a universe as autonomous as the detailed descriptions of cities (London and later Los Angeles), the Icelandic landscape and the convincingly depicted “in-between space” of an airport.  The author’s artistic and geographical world is characterized by its vividness, and the social contexts are also significant – the world of natural disasters, devastating fires, floods and melting glaciers. Kausc does not issue warnings or raise the alarm. She simply makes statements, contextualizes them and thus affects the readers’ possible physical experience all the more intensely.

Frustration with the incompleteness of individual stories can also have a desirable effect: “I was looking at Alyona and thinking about mysteries and their endings. Unnoticed at that moment, the missing James and his unfinished story crept into my mind. Even though he had only recently disappeared, everyone was actually anticipating the discovery of his body. But you’ll never find him. Someone else decided his story.” Other times there is talk of a story that “doesn’t want to come out,” and so on. Most of all, perhaps, the “courage to name” is valued – that seems to be the point of literature. Unfortunately, this courage is weakest in the character of John, the only significant male figure. The writer with the “common” surname Smith is the prototype of the successful man of letters. He goes to book signings, somewhat hypocritically maintains a relationship with a famous actress while playing the role of a reliable father in his family. He bewitches Sara, and later Emma, without knowing exactly what he’s done. The theme of literature takes over in his storyline but feels an order of magnitude weaker than Alyona’s photographs. We’ve seen quite a few philandering but reflective intellectuals in literature, and what’s more, reflections on creativity have suddenly started feeling a bit stilted here: while Alyona was reporting on her partner Emma’s writing, this was often hidden behind an image, and the meeting of the two literati yields no fascinating revelations.

Perhaps it’s just my distrust of happy endings, and – to be honest – the author doesn’t offer one anyway. On the way to the end, she writes: “[...] people belong to the story, but stories don’t belong to people.” It’s just one quip among many in this novel, and fortunately, the author often relativizes them or delves deep into the situation. Happily, after reading her prose, I was left with more than just an inventory of chic motifs: for it is no small thing in this country to come away from a contemporary prose work with a sense of having come upon a self-confident (aspiring) literary gesture."

Marta Ljubková, Literary Critics Award statement

 

"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

 

"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

 

"Ema Kausc’s Plot Disruption is a confident, almost provocatively self-assured work that walks the line of literary exhibitionism but does not step beyond it. The author works with contemporary realities and themes – climate change, the war in Ukraine, lesbian relationships and pandemics. The associative narrative storylines (between narrator and mother, narrator and lost friend Alyona, climatologist and politician,  and writer and actress) are intertwined not only with each other, but also with essayistic passages that explore the nature of memory and narrative."

Kryštof Špidla, Právo

 

"Emma Kausc enters the field of prose (…) with a novel full of references to literature, as well as to philosophy, fine arts, music and film. (…)

This sprawling, time-hopping narrative is held together by several distinctive themes, involving time, story and its role in our lives, foreignness and the search for a language for extreme experiences.

Among these prominent literary themes, the almost mythically depicted love story between the narrator Emma and the lost photographer Alyona truly stands out. Its portrayal alone makes Plot Disruption the clear literary event of the year."

Kryštof Eder, Deník N (Taking stock of books this year)

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