Overview
Aviaries is a novella composed of random diary entries, vignettes, dreams, observations, interior monologues, meditations, short anecdotes, newspaper headlines, and excerpts from poetry and prose, central among which is a passage from C.G. Jung's essay on the Kore. All these elements meld together in a collapse of time to create, similar to the work of Unica Z rn and Leonora Carrington, a phantasmagoria of the life of a woman navigating a city indifferent to those living on the margins. Interactions with other residents of Prague's Sm chov district, characters who might be figments of her imagination, and the other women in her life - infirm mother, artsy sister, absent, dumpster-diving daughter - have reached a point where fantasy and reality have seamlessly merged. The death of V clav Havel in 2011 provides the opening, and from there the prose throbs in a kaleidoscope of contemporary news reports, flights of hallucination, wordplay, and metaphoric association to testify to what it is like to be alone and lost and indigent in a world that has stopped making sense. It is a brutal vision of present-day Prague where life has become a morass of the bizarre and the grotesque. Brabcov 's final book before her unexpected death, Aviaries received the Josef Skvoreck Award in 2016 for best prose of the year and was shortlisted for the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year Award in 2017.
Full Product Details
Author: Zuzana Brabcova ,
Tereza Novicka
Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
Imprint: Twisted Spoon Press
ISBN: 9788086264516
ISBN 10: 8086264513
Pages: 132
Publication Date: 18 February 2019
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Brabcov is a superb stylist, and with this short book she has stepped beyond the wall of literary art that seldom allows for this type of social commentary and analysis. -- Respekt A sophisticated testimony about social exclusion that oscillates between diary, dream entries, and phantasmagorical prose. -- Liter rn noviny
A sophisticated testimony about social exclusion that oscillates between diary, dream entries, and phantasmagorical prose. -- Liter rn noviny Brabcov is a superb stylist, and with this short book she has stepped beyond the wall of literary art that seldom allows for this type of social commentary and analysis. -- Respekt
Author Information
Zuzana Brabcov (1959-2015) was born in Prague. After graduating high school she was denied by the communist regime the opportunity to study at university, so she worked as a librarian, hospital attendant, and as a cleaning lady for six years. After the regime fell in 1989, her first book, Far from the Tree, which had come out in samizdat abroad was officially published and received the very first Jir Orten Prize. Her novel Ceilings won a Magnesia Litera Award for Prose Book of the Year in 2013, and she followed this with Aviaries in 2016, completed just before her sudden death.
