Reading Europe celebrates Slovakia

Peter Krištúfek

There are 24 countries in the EU in addition to the 4 countries in the British Isles and Commonwealth. Before the EU Referendum let us take the opportunity to find out something more about fellow members and neighbours. The recommended titles have been selected to let the reader know the literature, history and culture of each country better.
On 2 June we celebrated the Czech Republic,  today we celebrate Slovakia and on the weekend of 4/5 June the Czech Republic and Slovakia together. The two Slovak titles titles featured in the Reading Europe List are:

House of a Deaf Man by Peter Kristufek, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood, (Parthian) ISBN 978 1 909844 27 8, 640 pages, £11.99
Alfonz Trnovsky, a genial and respected general practitioner in Breany, a small (fictitious) town in western Slovakia, spent his whole life pretending to be radiantly happy and contented, while the reality was quite different. He turned a deaf ear to his conscience as the 20th century hurtled by: four political regimes, the Holocaust, the political trials of the 1950s, the secret police before and after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia ..and the women he loved. But whose are the bones his son accidentally stumbles on buried in the garden? As he sets out to unravel this mystery, the son discovers other skeletons in his father's cupboard.
 
Rivers of Babylon by Peter Pišťanek, translated by Peter Petro (Garnett Press)
ISBN 978 1 95387 84 1, 259 pages, £12.99
Pišťanek's reputation is assured by the originality, craftsmanship and inventiveness of Rivers of Babylon and by its hero, the most mesmerizing character of Slovak literature, Racz, an idiot of genius, a psychopathic gangster. Racz appears in autumn 1989, when Socialism crumbles and robber baron capitalism is born. Better than any historian, Racz and Rivers of Babylon tell the story of a Central Europe, where criminals, intellectuals and ex-secret policemen have infiltrated a new democracy.
 
FURTHER READING ABOUT SLOVAKIA FROM DEDALUS PUBLISHERS
The Dedalus Book of Slovak Literature edited by Peter Karpinsky
ISBN 978 1 910213 04 9, 336 pages, £11.99
'Realism and naturalism dominate the complicated history of Slovak literature, and this collection of 20th-century stories by writers from the 1910s to the present, reflects that. But there are also questions about the novel or the story, a self-reflexiveness we recognise from the age of Modernism, and the themes of family and loss are universal.' The Sunday Herald

Reading Europe would also recommend the two further installments of Peter Pišťanek's Rivers Of Babylon and the recently very topical Samko Tále's Cemetary Book by Daniela Kapitáňová which introduces a bitter character plotting against his neighbours and his local drunken mystic in the Slovak/Hungarian/ Austrian borderlands.

All titles will be available at the Reading Europe London Pop up shop on Saturday 4 June.