The Vow

Can something that exists merely as a literary text, say a story, come about in real life? Can reality, to put it another way, steal something from literature, the same way literature steals from reality? Such is the question that Libor Hrach, the author of The Adventures of the Wise Badger, fields one evening over a hedonistic supper in a tony Brno restaurant from Kamil Modrácek, himself a burrowing animal of sorts, in Jirí Kratochvil's novel The Vow.

'Quite simply, I said, everything that has been written either has already happened, or is about to. You write a story, and you can never be sure if what you're writing isn't actually taking place two streets away from where you sit...' If this does not send chills down the spine of the reader of The Vow, they have got a high tolerance for the creepy.

Set in 1950s Brno, at the height of Gottwald's Stalinist reshaping of Czechoslovakia into a Communist prison, and partially in today's independent Czech Republic, Kratochvil, alternating between the dry Czech humour of Jaroslav HaSek and the uncanny, chilling otherworldliness of Edgar Allan Poe, takes the reader on a journey such as they have never been on before: to geographic areas in the beautiful Moravian city where no foot has set since the Middle Ages, and... places deep inside all of us, where most of us would rather never venture...

Auteur

Jirí Kratochvil (b. 1940) is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist and playwright. His first collection of short stories Prípad s Chatnoirem [The Black Cat Case, 1971] displeased the Communist authorities and led to his black-listing. From that time forward, until the fall of Communism, he published his fiction, which blends magical realism autobiography, in the underground press. His 1999 novel, Nocní tango aneb Román jednoho léta z konce století [Nocturnal Tango, or a Novel of One Year from the End of the Century] was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize. Slib [The Vow] contains autobiographical elements - such as the emigration of his father Josef (1915-2001) in the early fifties, and his own repression by Communist authorities - like the character Dan Kocí, he worked as a manual labourer. He has been awarded several literary prizes, such as the Tom Stoppard Prize (1991), the Egon Hostovský Prize (1996), the Karel Capek Prize (1998), and the Magnesia Litera Award for Prose (2020). His books have been published in seventeen languages. He lives in Moravský Krumlov.