Description
Written between 1995 and 2014, these twenty stories are set in rural South Bohemia. The reader encounters everyday minidramas, episodes that mark the canvas of great events of history or that merely capture a mood, and the dominant feelings and experiences of peculiar as well as seemingly ordinary individuals. The author makes no attempt to disguise the scent of the region; indeed, he exploits it to spice up and peculiarize his universal human stories. The main attributes of Hájíček’s writing are as follows: unpretentiousness in terms of style, characters and the stories themselves, intimate knowledge of a rural environment, depiction of atmosphere. For this author the return to realism and straightforward narration is not a choice but a matter of course arising out of his themes and the very substance of his prose. The short-story collection Memories of a Village Dance completes the picture of Jiří Hájíček as a novelist of provincial life, and as such it is a fine addition to the body of prose he has produced.
