Ohledávání času přítomného – Fučík Ondřej (2020)

"Popel's novel Exploring the Present Time, on the other hand, swells not only with the imagination with which the story is developed but also with a style that is lush, rich, and compels some passages to be read aloud, to burst into laughter, or to shudder. The novel project, as the title suggests, is built on the framework of great modernist novels – not only Proust's In Search of Lost Time but also Kafka's novels, Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Klíma's The Suffering of Prince Sternenhoch, and so on. From these great authors, Richard Popel takes the need for experimental and grandiose writing and storytelling; at the same time, however, these novels, especially Proust's Search, are nostalgically pushed into the past in the story as something that was but is no longer. The novel, in a post-apocalyptic spirit, depicts a world somewhat similar to the world of Topol's The Sensitive Man – a world that appears as an impenetrable chaos that has torn away all traditional roots and affiliations and offers only provisional survival. It is precisely in contrast to the images of the present that those great novels of the past, to which it refers, resonate all the more suggestively, but which in the contemporary world also sound museum-like and unusable." Petr A. Bílek – Editorial preparation Martin Machovec. Published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Czech Foundation...