Gottland
-
- USD 11.99
-
- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
Ganador del Premio del Libro Europeo el año 2009, Gottland es para Mariusz Szczygiel la República Checa. Por eso ha escrito un libro a la vez erudito y magistral sobre los checos, lleno de personajes e historias insólitas: la edificación del monumento a Stalin más grande del mundo; la ascensión y caída de una estrella de cine de la que Goebbels se había enamorado perdidamente; la epopeya de la dinastía Bata; los subterfugios de la sobrina de Franz Kafka para conservar el anonimato? Gottland es, al fin y al cabo, una maravillosa colección de pequeños cuentos crueles.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An already lauded collection of episodic reportage from the pen of a prolific Polish journalist (European Book Prize 2009), this grimly themed but spryly sequenced investigation into the secret-plagued reality of 20th-century Czechoslovakia falls gently short of expectations in an intriguing yet overall monotonous translation. The chronologically progressive, "mostly true" stories depict with varying scales of focus the lives and times of an eclectic cast of Czech individuals, some of them well known, like Tomas Bata, the tenacious turn-of-the-century shoe merchant who transformed his father's languishing cobbler trade into a diversified socio-industrial empire, others with scant name recognition even in their native land, like Otakar Sveck, a depressive Prague sculptor-manque whose commission to design the largest-ever Stalin monument on the banks of the Vltava River proved his own psychic toppling. The leitmotif of these tales is dispossession: the Czech people struggling to remain individuals in a state where individualism is literally a crime. Faced with the hand-tailored sadism and iron whimsy of occupying forces, these men and women must make a choice: resist or submit. With notable and deeply affecting exceptions it tends to be a lugubrious combination of the two.