Мариуш Щигел4.2 "Готтленд" польского журналиста и одного из лучших современных репортеров Мариуша Щигела - не только прекрасный "путеводитель" по чешским судьбам XX века, но и высокохудожественная литература. Автор пишет о создателях и разрушителях "самого большого на всем земном шаре" памятника Сталину в Праге, об обувной империи Бати, о чехословацкой актрисе, ставшей любовницей Геббельса, о племяннице Франца Кафки, о чешском подростке, повторившем поступок Яна Палаха и поджегшем себя на Вацлавской площади, а также о других не столь известных, но не менее интересных фигурах. Собранные в книге репортажи ломают укоренившееся представление о чехах как о мирной нации любителей пива. Социалистическая Чехословакия по Щигелу - отнюдь не мифическая страна добродушных швейков. Это страна многолетнего жестокого режима, пропитанного страхом и ощущением кафкианского абсурда.
Ханна Кралль4.0 Ханна Кралль (р.1937) - один из самых известных прозаиков Польши. Мировую славу принесла ей книга-интервью с Мареком Эдельманом, последним руководителем восстания в Варшавском гетто, - "Опередить Господа Бога" (1977).
Роман "Королю червонному - дорога дальняя" можно назвать и авантюрным, и плутовским, хотя в первую очередь он о необыкновенной любви жены к мужу среди ужасов Холокоста.
Ismail Kadare3.9 The mysterious Palace of Dreams stands at the heart of a vast but fragile Balkan empire. Inside, workers assiduously sift, sort, classify, and ultimately interpret the dreams of the empire's citizens. The workers search out Master-Dreams that will provide clues to the destiny of the empire and its Sultan. Mark-Alem, scion of a noble family that has provided viziers to the Sultan from time immemorial, and whose power the Sultan distrusts, is recruited into the Palace of Dreams at the humblest level.
He immediately feels the terrible pressure that drives his co-workers, the dread of overlooking a crucial dream whose capture and interpretation might avert political disaster. But he rapidly rises through the hierarchy—and the pressure only increases as he becomes familiar with the fates of subversive dreamers and personally responsible for the sorts of dreams that might ruin an entire family. A family like his own. The Palace of Dreams is powerfully imagined and beautifully written, a national classic from one of Albania's premiere literary voices.
Dubravka Ugresic4.2 The Ministry of Pain tells the story of Tanja Lucic, an exile from Yugoslavia and a lecturer in Serbo-Croatian literature at the University of Amsterdam. Her class is filled with other Yugoslav exiles, not much younger than she, who have found temporary refuge in the Department of Slavonic Languages. Rather than teach literature, Tanja prods the students to reconstruct their pasts by writing essays that indulge their "Yugonostalgia" and their memories of Yugoslavia's culture and disintegration in war. Meanwhile, Tanja and her student Igor form a dangerously close relationship that threatens to unleash all the tensions of life in exile. With her sharp and melancholy observations, Dubravka Ugresic illuminates with savage compassion our shared human homelessness.
Attila Bartis0.0 Tranquility is a living seismograph of the internal quakes and ruptures of a mother and son trapped within an Oedipal nightmare amidst the suffocating totalitarian embrace of Communist Hungary. Andor Weér, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a cramped apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies, and appeasement. Then Andor meets the beautiful and nurturing Eszter, a woman who seems to have no past, and they fall wildly in love at first sight. With a fulfilling life seemingly within reach for the first time, Andor decides that he is ready to bring Eszter home to meet Mother. Though Bartis’s characters are unrepentantly neurotic and dressed in the blackest humor, his empathy for them is profound. A political farce of the highest ironic order, concluding that "freedom is a condition unsuitable for humans," Tranquility is ultimately, at its splanchnic core, a complex psychodrama turned inside out, revealing with visceral splendor the grotesque notion that there’s nothing funnier than unhappiness.
