SHORT STORIES
Snidane na refyzi
The Breakfast on Safety Island
(Hynek, 1998)
The slow action of these simple stories and the concentration on the main epic line enables the author to focus on the internal developments and upon the emotions of the hero. The protagonist each of these stories is called Pavel. In each case, though he is not one and the same character, he is always a fragile, melancholy young man from the countryside of the South Bohemia. Many of these short stories have been dramatized for radio broadcasting.
Dreveny nuz
The Wooden Knife
(Host 2004) >>> excerpt
It´s a collection of twelve short stories which are connected through the environment of the
South Bohemian countryside. Small human dramas of everyday´s life which flow like a river without pathos or spectacularity. The time period between the first story (Memories of a Village Dancing in 1986) and the last story (Melancholic Leaves From the Autumn Trees of Democracy) lasts for 10 years. What does this period of time mean in the ordinary life of the main figures?
Fotbalove deniky
Football Diaries
(Host 2007)
In June 2006, just as the football World Cup is beginning in Germany, instead of journeying around the German stadiums as originally planned, due to a strange coincidence, Honza finds himself in a car with a 19-year old girl. He has known her for just a week but he is much closer to her than he first thinks. Instead of German motorways, there are minor roads in need of repair; instead of hotels, there are mostly dusty, blue-collar lodging houses and even a sleepover on the airbed. Simona and Honza's curious summer trip seems to be endless, going round and round in circles, bordered by the results of the matches of the Czech National Team, with their hopes and disappointments. In this “football road movie” the feelings of a quadragenarian tackle more than the game of football. This man seemingly lacks nothing, but still he suffers from feelings of loneliness and emptiness.
In this novella, in contrast to his successful novel Rustic Baroque / Selský baroko, Jiri Hajicek does not get involved in heavy historical issues, but readers will find many typical things here from Hajicek´s rural writings.
Zlodeji zelenych koni
The Green Horse Rustlers
(Host 2001) >>> excerpt
This novel is a present time story from the Czech countryside dealing with the long-lasting problem of illegal mining of Moldavite stones in the South Bohemia. Moldavites are original Czech semi-precious gem stones which are a result of a meteorite impact that occured 15 milion years ago. Moldvites were created through the fusion with earth material that sprayed out of the crater formed by that crash. They resemble green glass with peculiar distortions on the surface and they often have bubbles trapped inside.
This is a dramatic story of several Moldavite-diggers as they evolve in their uncontrolled passion for their quest. The story of their illegal search for the magic minerals is a backdrop for even more dramatic episodes dealing with relationships and emotions of these main characters, including friendship, love, betrayal and disappointment. The author´s style of writing is almost documentary and matter-of-fact, which makes his book even more thrilling.
The novel was translated into the Hungarian and was published by Magus (Budapest) in 2003.
Dobrodruzi hlavniho proudu
The Mainstream Adventurers
(Host 2002)
It´s a classic tale set in the real world of the 1990s in Bohemia. Pavel and Dominika get to know one another at the end of the 1980s, but the passion of their early love is followed by the gradual disintegration of their relationship. Both have the feeling that the political and social changes of 1989 in Czechoslovakia have created the space in which they can realize their dreams while Pavel is bitten by the business bug, believing this to be the area in which he will find himself, Dominika leaves for France to search for her relatives and uncover her roots. The novel's plot is packed with dramatic events in which we often encounter the political realities of the 1990s (including restitution, racketeering, bankruptcy, imprisonment, the opportunity to travel abroad to the west, something which was almost unheard of before the Velvet Revolution).
Hájicek's novel is vivid in its depictions in as much as that the author never allows himself to be drawn away from the authenticity of his setting, nor does he allow his gaze to be deflected from observation of the developments and changes that his heroes undergo, right up to the event which pitches them (as if) back to the beginning of their relationship. The novel, as a whole, pose – albeit in various mutations – a single question: is it possible to go back and start anew?
Selsky baroko
Rustic Baroque
(Host 2005) >>> excerpt
The novel Rustic Baroque is built up in two time levels and presents a story from today´s Czech countryside and at the same time takes the reader back to the 1950s Czechoslovakia.
In the decade after 1948, when the Communist Regime seized power, the Czech countryside suffered the so-called „collectivisation“, a process of forced transformation of private farms into state-controlled co-operatives in compliance with the Soviet lines with the sole purpose of eliminating one whole social class: big private landowners. Through brutal coecion, intimidation, imprisonment as well as through provocation and arranged trials, the peasants were pressured to surrender their land and livestock to these newly established co-operatives.
Surprisingly, this matter, which was long tabooed and exclusively treated in a tendentious and biased maner in Communist Eastern Europe, didn´t receive much reflection after the fall of the Communist Regime.
The main character of the story is the genealogist, Pavel Stranansky, a middle-aged man who makes his living by compiling family trees, especially for wealthy emigrants looking for their roots in their native country. He mostly spends his time in archives and has collected an enormous database of people , birth and death records, blood ties and property relations in his notebook. His main workplace is the State Archive in the little town of Trebon in Southern Bohemia. It´s here that novel´s plot starts to unfold. It´s a story of crime and passion that takes place within two months of one hot summer. Pavel Stranansky searches for the denouncement letter written in the 1950s which brought several people to the Communist jail at that time. The surprise ending of the novel evokes questions of guilt, revenge and pardon. .
The novel was translated into the Hungarian and was published by Kalligram in 2008. The novel was translated into the Italian and was published by Centro Full Service in 2009.
