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Book details:
 
Baradla Cave


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  baradla cave

by Eva Švankmajerová

translated from the Czech by Gwendolyn Albert
illustrated by the author and Jan Švankmajer


Baradla Cave is a novel by the Czech Surrealist Eva Švankmajerová, who is perhaps best known for her paintings and collaboration with her husband Jan Švankmajer on a number of films. Originally published in samizdat in the 1980s, the book was republished in 1995 by Edice Analogon, having lost none of the force of its social critique and wit. Baradla is a living organism, both place (Prague) and person (a woman), and the novel explores maternity and femininity while offering a satirical look at the overweening mother-state and consumer society. As the language shifts between psuedo-scientific jargon, common vernacular, and metaphoric stream, scenes of episodic sexual violence alternate with humorous reflections on various ingrained habits and customs. Švankmajerová's sense of the absurd is seemingly without limit, fingering here practically everything having to do with modern urban existence: drug addiction, murder, sex crimes, corruption, and dysfunctional family relationships.

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What others say:

Eva's Baradla is a work that will live a long life.

— Vratislav Effenberger

How long must English-language readers wait for someone to translate her.

— Penelope Rosemont (editor of Surrealist Women)

Svankmajerova's mode of literary expression is in like manner heavily visual in character and, like her paintings, the artist's 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

Svankmajerova's style of surrealism can be daunting at first. The stream-of-consciousness thoughts of one character often wind and wend their way into the mind of another. Whether that mind belongs to a man, a woman, or a cave is sometimes for the reader to decide. But her use of surrealism to convey non-life under totalitarianism pre-dates the same technique visible in Victor Pelevin's novel The Clay Machine Gun. Both works describe a crumbling society speeding towards America's consumer lifestyle, with large Japanese corporations in the driving seat.

Blue Ear

   

ISBN 9788090217171
140 pp.
14.5 x 20.5 cm
softcover with flaps
smythe sewn
5 full-color illustrations
fiction : novel

out of stock
new edition here


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