Zajatec představ – Nemec David (2016)

The romantic, detective, and erotic thriller The Captive begins where many similarly gripping books end – in prison. It is there that the suggestive anti-hero Paul Raber meets his femme fatale – the beautiful, mysterious, yet somewhat psychologically disturbed poetess Seena Schain. Paul is a sociopath incapable of forming normal social relationships; he is hopelessly stuck in the colorful fantasies from his childhood, viewing life coldly and calculatingly, as if it were merely a chess game. A reading from the prison therapeutic program becomes a fateful encounter, the fulfillment of which Paul is later willing to sacrifice all his prospects for, and he does not stop at almost anything on his path to his dream. A relationship full of love and tenderness, but also cold calculation, lies, and mutual cruelty ultimately rather brutally explores the existential question of what fulfillment in a relationship between a man and a woman actually means... The combination of fateful love, eroticism, poetry, prison themes, and the darkest human instincts in Němcová's rendition recalls works of world literature like those of Haruki Murakami or the cursed poet Sylvia Plath in the character of Seena and her texts, without being in any way derivative.