Book Description

With famous Everyday Spooks (orig. publ. 1961), Prague-born Karel Michal presents an unforgettable assortment of fantastic creatures that inhabit his strange vision of everyday reality in '50s and '60s communist Czechoslovakia. Translated from the Czech by David Short and complemented with suitably eerie illustrations by Dagmar Hamsíková, this collection of seven short stories describes bizarre encounters where the past melts into the present, ordinary people meet comic and anxious figures and interact with ghosts, and mundane speech drifts repeatedly into absurdity. In Everyday Spooks, Karel Michal shares a forgotten world populated by murderous dwarves, cockabogies, ghosts, and the grotesque Doodledor. Written in the communist Czechoslovakia of the '50s and '60s, Michal's stories reflect a strange in-between-ness, a realm caught between medieval folklore and the oppressive modern state. Here, otherwise simple language that wouldn't be out of place in a children's book - indeed, translator David Short calls these 'grotesque fairy tales' - intermingles with discussion of quotas, class, and government agencies. This childish form allows Michal the freedom to address what he considers the injustices of the state, and subversively note the absurdities he finds in Czech culture. In each story, Michal seems to toy with his reader as he toys with his characters - and as a dead cat might toy with his prey. In "The Dead Cat," Michal plays with logic in the honorable tradition of Lewis Carroll: "'Now look here . . . iťs either or. Nobody can be two things at once. Either you're a dead cat, in which case you've no business speaking, or you're a live cat and then you've even less . . .'" Michal's dead cat engages in all kinds of sedition and blasphemy - to the horror of all who converse with him - but the story itself is genius, its cat utterly logical, jenseits von Gut und Böse: a thought-computer. In the body of this cat, in the guise of a children's tale, Michal speaks truth to the powers that be - and the unspeakable is spoken in each of these stories. Though the translation of Everyday Spooks has yielded some interesting phrases - colloquial Czech and rural accents abound, and Short interprets these with such locutions as 'soddin' superslut' and 'bog-trottin' bitch,' as well as other equally hilarious and bizarre expressions - despite these idiosyncrasies, or perhaps because of them, Michal's little book of tales is charming, an unlikely but enjoyable marriage of the odd old world and the absurd emerging new. Jeff Waxman, CONTEXT, Review of Contemporary Fiction, University of Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, pp.244-45