Den kobylek - Ze slz mají užitek jedině ti, kdo neztrácejí naději – West Nathanael (2020)

This Czech-language novel, Nathanael West’s major work and creative testament, takes a sardonic look at Hollywood’s mass production of American dreams, or rather at the gallery of human types staggering through its lower levels and fringes. The scenery of these wondrous substitutes is explored by Tod, a set designer from the cultivated eastern United States, who hopes to find inspiration for a majestic painting depicting the fire consuming rotten Los Angeles. He records the desires of those trying to seize at least a fragment of its glitter, escape dull employment and briefly break free from a cycle of futility. Along the way he encounters grotesque representatives of Hollywood’s human menagerie: former variety performers, wooden extras and eccentric operators, women inhabiting the unclear border between actresses and prostitutes, and even the tragic prototype of all the future downtrodden Homer Simpsons. From the unfulfillable hopes of the foot soldiers of America’s lower middle class eventually emerges a frustrated crowd—a biblical plague of locusts that lynches everything outside the film-set illusions and drives the story towards apocalypse.