Bakšiš – Kratochvil Jiří (2018)

This grotesque novel was originally intended to be called Fable, as if the writer wanted to suggest that the story is the work of an anonymous narrator who invented the characters’ lives and recounts them to us. He even places this narrator directly in the plot as a manipulator of the fates of his heroes: Daniela, a woman of extraordinary beauty, and the very young bachelor Jakoubek. The storyteller is a goblin living in a hollow tree, from which he has driven out an owl, and appearing in village legends and tales under various names. He insists that those who have encountered him, or into whose dreams he has wandered, mistakenly consider him evil, while he is actually beyond good and evil: a goblin who will never harm anyone, but will never help either. The goblin takes mischievous pleasure in telling his story, altering his characters’ fates like a tailor making a wedding suit, measuring, stitching, correcting, unpicking and sewing again, adding lace, changing the fabric, lengthening trousers, searching pockets or placing new destinies and other stories inside them. The lining beneath the lining is Jiří Kratochvil himself, the goblin in the tree hollow, fascinated by human sexuality. Through the goblin, he admits that his greatest desire is to set an amusing story in motion and then enjoy telling it. The Persian word bakshish means a gift, and through his goblin narrator Jiří Kratochvil presents an original variation on the eternal story of man and woman.