Memento – John Radek (2014)

MEMENTO is a novel about drug addicts. This sentence conveys the most important aspect, but by no means everything. Above all, it does not express that the author conceived his prose as a witness statement – not as a story "about them," but as "their" story. The reader is drawn into the heart of the action, into the lives of those who have succumbed to drugs, for whom getting high becomes the main or rather the only meaning of life, who slide down the slippery slope of self-destructive passion to utter ruin. In Memento, we do not read lessons, warnings, or alerts, but we penetrate into human destinies, deeply feeling how little it takes for a person's life to collapse into futile and hopeless existence. It is characteristic of the author's portrayal that it was created almost twenty years ago, when drug addiction problems were just beginning to emerge in our country. Back then, it was a cautionary work; today, unfortunately, it is different. However, the power of the novel has not lost its effectiveness; quite the opposite…