Kobold

Název: Kobold
Počet stran: 327

Kobold (Excess of Tenderness and Excess of People) is a double novel. Two stories in one book as two elements – water and fire, which transforms what is seen. Or two rivers merged into one stream? It is a book about the forms of irresistible love and subtle violence. About how human existence is predetermined by the family we are born into, or the ideology in which we immerse ourselves. About a society that is inwardly and outwardly charmed, to all the “weaker”, the receptive. The torment of these characters are the diseases of our time. And the source of these torments seems to be the Kobolds.

Kobold is a loose continuation of And I Still Who’s Beating (2005) and Money from Hitler (2006) and completes her trilogy on the Central European 20th century.

Radka Denemarková’s extensive book Kobold is a challenging, but at the same time completely unique narrative experiment. In book form, he combines the novel story The Surplus of Tenderness (About Water) with the novella The Surplus of People (About Fire). The two prose stories are set on opposite sides of the book, and the author leaves it up to the reader not only to decide whether, how much, and how to connect the two stories together in their reading and interpretation, but also the initial decision in which order to read them at all. This creates a project of an “open work” or score that draws the reader into the play and demands interpretive decisions. The two stories are – like the elemental elements in their subtitles – mutually exclusive but also compatible. The novel’s narrative, The Excess of Tenderness, is spread across a wide time zone of historical ruptures in the 1920s. century, but also across diverse spaces that function both literally and symbolically. The novella The Surplus of People, on the other hand, is concentrated in one space and time – only the parallel novel story provides it with a wider contextual anchor. Both the novel and the novella are deeply depressing stories, tales of human cruelty, misunderstanding, and passing with fatal consequences…

Petr A. Bílek, Juror of the Czech Book Prize