Ladislav Fuks - Tvář a maska – Kovalčík Aleš (2007)

The book is a distinctive monograph of the significant Czech prose writer Ladislav Fuks. Through the lens of the partial motif of "mask," the author examines not only the entire body of the writer's work but also, to a considerable extent, Fuks's personal life, marked by a permanent need to hide. Through the analysis of the panoptical world of Fuks's characters, Aleš Kovalčík creates a typology of various ways of masking and concealing true identity while also pointing to the extraliterary causes of this masking. The book also traces the transformations of Fuks's mystification techniques in relation to changes in the social climate, along a timeline from the sixties to the eighties. The monograph thus introduces readers in an original way to the bizarre community of Fuks's characters, the strangest of whom is Fuks himself.