Obyčejný život – Čapek Karel (2010)

KAREL ČAPEK became world-famous thanks to his play R.U.R., so many considered him primarily a dramatist or a science fiction author. Soon after, he also emerged as an excellent travel writer and essayist, distinguished by his wit and observational talent to see the extraordinary side of ordinary things. By the end of the 1920s, he won readers' favor with his two collections of masterful short prose, Stories from the First Pocket and Stories from the Second Pocket. However, his work culminated in three novelistic prose pieces – the third of which was Ordinary Life. Its hero is a railway clerk who, at the end of his life, attempts to describe the course of his ordinary life. When he is dismissed, he begins to engage in an increasingly passionate debate with himself about who he actually was and what kind of life he truly lived. Gradually, he finds within himself seemingly overlooked motives for his actions, a sort of hidden self that seems to deviate from the frame of ordinary life. Every human life, even the seemingly most ordinary, proves, as Čapek shows, to be rich and complex; we all live only one of our possibilities. But even those unfulfilled possibilities help us understand other people and comprehend their lives. Ordinary Life is among the most remarkable works...