Cvrček mého krbu – Šlejhar Josef Karel (2017)

In the most extensive and yet unpublished prose work, Josef K. Šlejhar, known primarily as the author of the novella The Melancholic Chicken, grapples with his marriage and, by extension, with the world as a whole. Over more than seven hundred pages, he uses an unusually vivid and almost animalistic language to pile up images of shared days, general reflections, memories, and feelings. With almost stenographic precision, he records the sequence of events that preceded his life's shipwreck. With both anger and humility, romantic fervor and patriarchal pride, roughness and tenderness, he repeatedly presents evidence against his own fate. He indicts it, presents it with a bill. With a stubbornness characteristic of himself, he prepares a closing speech before a great jury that never convened and never will. This, however, does not change the fact that The Cricket of My Hearth is an exceptional, gripping read.