Stories of the Town of Brno

Jiří Kratochvil´s Brno – fateful “genius loci”. Stories of the Town of Brno is without doubt one of Jiří Kratochvil's creative peaks. We are immediately enthralled by the author´s obsession with a story and its telling. And his stories are not just any old stories: in the unbelievable grotesque somersaults of time and space their characters and their fates are interlaced (at times in a downright comic, at others in a rough burlesque way, sometimes even in a manner metaphysically dark and mysterious). The author is a Creator with a capital “C”, forming his own worlds out of “substance our world is made of” in such a self-confident way and with remarkable inventiveness and virtuosity. Yet he retains a humble knowledge of our limitations; in the words of one of his heroes: “I know just one single thing for sure: we live in a world in which we are often but inadvertent intermediators, intermediaries, just couriers of news illegible and incomprehensible to us, just links in a chain we know nothing about.” It is no exaggeration to say that with Stories of the Town of Brno Jiří Kratochvil has declared himself the Jorge Luis Borges of the Czech literature.