Asfaltový hoch – Jackanin Ivan (2020)

Ivan Jackanin is a Ukrainian writer, prose author, translator, and journalist who lives and creates in Slovakia. For more than thirty years, he has attracted readers with the unique world he offers in his prose. He brings closer the journey into conscience and honor, the escape from the false, and the return to the real that has not yet vanished in this world. The stories of Ivan Jackanin bear the seal of deep tragedy, where everything unfolds within the bounds of an extended metaphor that sometimes embraces the entirety of human life. "Well, life... You live... And then what? A pointless question. Perhaps because of such a life, many people said goodbye to life? Life... It makes your head spin..." The opening words of one of the stories perhaps best capture the mood of the book. The themes of twenty-five stories, not only from the Ukrainian countryside, set in a time span from World War II to the present, often focus on the unfortunate fates of their characters, struggles in relationships and their own existence, but also on seemingly ordinary life. The entire book is characterized by the author's mature linguistic style and narrative method that completely captivates the reader.