The Vow: A Requiem for the Fifties

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 Modráček himself a burrowing animal of sorts in Jiří Kratochvils 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 youre writing isnt 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 Gottwalds Stalinist reshaping of Czechoslovakia into a Communist prison and partially in todays 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...