Overview

The novel Baradla Cave has lost none of the force of its social critique and trenchant humor since it originally appeared in samizdat in the 1980s and officially published in 1995 by Edice Analogon. A living organism, Baradla is both place (Prague) and person (a woman), an exploration of maternity and femininity as well as a satirical look at the overweening mother-state and consumer society. The language collage comprising pseudo-scientific jargon, the diction of interwar magazines for women and girls, the demotic, and metaphoric stream is complemented by Jan Svankmajer's erotic collages, as scenes of episodic sexual violence alternate with humorous reflections on various ingrained habits and customs. With a seemingly boundless sense of the absurd, Svankmajerová fingers here practically everything having to do with modern existence: substance abuse, violent sex crimes, rampant consumerism, pervasive corruption, and dysfunctional family relationships.

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9788086264479

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How long must English-language readers wait for someone to translate her. -- Penelope Rosemont (editor of Surrealist Women) It is like looking at a surrealistic painting. You might say What is going on? but when you look closer there is a certain sense of something even if it is not entirely clear what that something is. Humour and the unreal are part but only part of it, while much of it is letting us see the world in a completely different way from the way we normally do and that i s what Svankmajerová brilliantly does in this novel. The only surprise is that it is not better known. -- The Modern Novel Svankmajerová's mode of literary expression is likewise heavily visual in character and, like her paintings, the writing reflects a delicate balance of reality and irony, humor and terror. [...] The novel is an astute and satirical - however troubling - account of late 20th-century society. -- Prager Zeitung

Author Information

Eva Svankmajerová was born on September 25, 1940, in the Czech town of Kostelec nad Černými Lesy. She came to Prague in 1954 to study interior design at the School of Applied Arts and later puppetry at the Drama Academy. An active member of the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group since 1970, she was known for her paintings and ceramic work, and her poetry and prose regularly appeared in the group's journal Analogon. In addition, she collaborated with her husband, Jan Svankmajer, on a number of joint exhibitions and films. She died on October 20, 2005.

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