Smát se nahlas – Nezval Martin (2023)

After the bold, witty, and politically incorrect novel Girls from Non-Profit, the authors did not disappoint again. While progressive journalists imposed a curse on the novel in the form of cancel culture, the alternative community awarded it the Kramerius Prize. The novel Laughing Out Loud is once again a major provocation. The idea of staging the story of Jaroslav Hašek as a play within a play (albeit here in prose form) allows for a confrontation between two worlds through both obvious and hidden parallels, despite the fact that more than a hundred years lie between them, their similarity is – especially today – striking. Jaroslav Hašek is the most translated prose writer in the world. However, this is not an obstacle for the current establishment to ostentatiously disregard him and to grandly ignore his work. Jaroslav Hašek has never received any literary award, and no Czech president has ever honored him, even posthumously, although he belongs to the indispensable Czechs on a global scale. Although it has been a hundred years since his death this year (2023) and a hundred and forty years since his birth, he is officially forgotten or lives only in the form of small, mostly grotesque fragments, often misleading in nature. In a way, cinema has contributed to this. Perhaps with the exception of the film The Great Journey (where a then twenty-three-year-old actor brilliantly portrayed Jaroslav Hašek...)