Transfigured Night

By: Libuse Monikova, Anne Posten (Translator), Helga Braunbeck (Afterword by)

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Paperback | 19 April 2023 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
125 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.05 x 12.7 x 2.28

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$54.99

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A vision of late-twentieth-century Prague from an acclaimed Czech novelist.

In late 1992, three years after the Velvet Revolution and as Czechoslovakia is about to dissolve into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, choreographer and dancer Leonora Marty, who fled the Communist state decades earlier, has returned to Prague. Having wrapped up her ballet of The Makropulos Affair, the famous dancer meets old classmates, wanders the city through crowds of tourists, and visits the most obscure and unvisited museums. When she is approached by Thomas Asperger, a descendant of ethnic Germans driven from Czechoslovakia after World War II, she must confront three relationships—her relationship with the city of her youth, her homeland’s relationship with its past, and her new romance with this German admirer.

Written in German and published in 1995, by an author whose life mirrored her protagonist’s, the novel provides a cultural tour of Prague. Employing a style as influenced by the operas of Leoš Janacek as the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Transfigured Night is a masterpiece of Czech literature, showing that the culture of this nation comes in a variety of tongues.

Industry Reviews

"While Transfigured Night offers a snapshot of one character's experience in Prague in the 1990s, the book's themes, particularly the uncertainty about capitalism, are still relevant today. In the city center, vendors continue to sell Matrjoski painted with the faces of famous actors and military caps sporting the hammer and sickle. When the city shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, talks of reviving the city tourist center to a more authentically Czech space - or at least one devoid of the proliferation of imported junk - were renewed. Monikova's final novel, therefore, presents English-speaking readers with familiar questions to consider about the city and our future, even for those familiar with the country's past." * apofenie *

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