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Twisted Spoon Press

PO Box 21 - Preslova 12, 150 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic

Book details:
 
Kye

[ excerpt ]

English originals


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also by the author:
The Doll
Ashtrays


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  kye

by Lukáš Tomin

illustrated by Alf Van der Plank


In many ways a companion to Ashtrays, Tomin's previous novel, Kye shifts the setting from Paris, where exuberance was found in excess, to London, where the organism senses itself to be out of balance and is acutely aware of its decay. The euphoria has long passed as Kye is unable to break the inertia of his drinking, smoking, and unfulfilled sexual fantasies. As such, Tomin explores the trap exile has become for him, making clear his identity as Czech. Gradually overcome by his impotence to act decisively, Kye reflects on all that was left and lost "back there."

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What others say:

[U]nique experimental prose ... depicting a surreally disjointed and thorny world.

Time Out Guide

Tomin's writing moves seamlessly between poetry and prose, employing rhyme and wordplay to create extra-linear meanings which deepen and extend rather than detract from the central narration. Less an experiment than an excursion into the depths of language, Tomin's work deserves to be read more widely.

— Stephan Delbos, The Oxonian Review

The setting is contemporary London. The narrator, Kye, is a Czech expatriate who lives a life of alcoholism, dissolution, and general purposelessness ... remembering more directed times: his revels in Paris, his youth in Czechoslovakia as a student demonstrator. Kye's mind leaps and spills like a pinata. Where text becomes consciousness, the protagonist's personality, conversely, becomes a semiotic field of imaginings and symbolic markers. Avidly experimental in approach, the lines between observation and fantasy are dissolved, points of view are conflated, and the nervous drift of the narrative sweeps the reader into dislocation. While Tomin's literary influences are modernist, his voice and sense of humor are uniquely contemporary.

The Prague Post

... an extraordinary and important young writer.

— Fay Weldon

   

ISBN 9788090125780
144 pp.
14.5 x 20.5 cm
softcover with flaps
12 b/w etchings, lithographs
fiction : novel

release date:
October 1997

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