The Opportune Moment, 1855

by Patrik Ou?ednik, Patrik Ou'rednik, Patrik Ou Edn K, Alex Zucker (Translator)

Overview

A Voltairean attack on the political idealism that gave birth to the modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564785961
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	04/14/2011
Series:	Czech Literature Series
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Patrik Ouředník was born in Prague, but immigrated to France in 1984 where he still lives. He is the author of twlve books, including fiction, essays, and poems. He is also the Czech translator of novels, short stories, and plays from such writers as Francois Rabelais, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Queneau, Samuel Beckett, and Boris Vian. He has received a number of literary awards for his writing, including the Czech Literary Fund Award.

Patrik Ou edn k was born in Prague, but immigrated to France in 1984 where he still lives. He is the author of twlve books, including fiction, essays, and poems. He is also the Czech translator of novels, short stories, and plays from such writers as Fran ois Rabelais, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Queneau, Samuel Beckett, and Boris Vian. He has received a number of literary awards for his writing, including the Czech Literary Fund Award.

Alex Zucker is an editor, writer and translator of Czech literature. He has received an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the ALTA National Translation Award. He currently serves as co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee.

Editorial Reviews

A treasure of historical and imaginative detail converge in this fascinating work about a group of disenchanted Europeans who travel to Brazil in the mid-19th century to start a utopian society. The aged founder of the experimental settlement begins the narrative in 1902 as a letter to his first love, Julia, and works his way backward: Italian and illegitimate by birth, he was early on fired up by Enlightenment ideals and so disgusted by conventions and prejudices of the day that he proposed the abolition of marriage and a kind of gleeful disorganization of society. Subsequently, in diary entries that grow gradually more discombobulated over the months from January to October 1855, another writer—one of the original utopia seekers—exposes via simple, plainspoken writings his bamboozlement by the fiery exhortations of the ship's anarchists and communists, and, eventually, reveals how the exalted experiment descends into petty bickering, disputes, grandstanding, fights over women, and general debauchery—practical anarchy, in short. Ourednik (Case Closed) fashions a cleverly satirical commentary on the bare-knuckled realities of what happens when grand (and often naïve) ideas are put into practice. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

We have been presented with a small gem of humor that confirms the originality of this Czech novelist.

Epok

Deliciously Voltairean.

Libération

Patrik Ouředník handles satire with the mastery of a Chinese executioner carving up his victim: behold the enormity of ideological idiocy.

Le Magazine Littéraire