Abstracts for Host 4/2007

Michal Sykora
Storm clouds of civilization

The best pieces of British prose have always been successful in harmonizing the pleasure of reading with deeper intellectual purport. Bestsellers are not only consumer goods; they can also be a subject for academic discussions which are not always limited to the specialists in paraliterature. It is a literature that doesn’t resign from telling gripping stories, but also knows that merely gripping stories don’t suit the purpose. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas also falls under this category.

And then you’ll collect shards… (Interview with critic, writer, and musician Jan Stolba)

“I hesitate to speak about that, but you asked…” In exactly this way – paraphrasing the title of one of the texts from his latest book Unfalling jug – the interview with poet, writer, and jazzman Jan Stolba (b.1957) could start. Although he doesn’t feel competent to give wise judgments about Czech poetry and was rather reluctant to agree to the interview, he confirmed, indirectly, the fact that he is able to see the phenomenon of Czech poetry from many different viewpoints, so as not to reduce the very phenomenon and, at the same time, to learn as much as possible about it. Though, as he says, he enters other authors’ texts swiftly, his approach, consisting in fine comparison of different views, creates in both his essays and literary works a fidgety atmosphere requiring unbiased and attentive reading.