Case Closed by Patrik Ouredník

Czech  fiction

Original title -Ad acta

Translator – Alex Zucker

Source – Personal copy

I decided to do Czech Lit Month partly because of this and a few other books that I have purchased over the last few years from Czech writers but have yet to get to. Patrik Ourenik has written about 20 books. He has also translated many books from Czech to French and the other way around. He emigrated to France initially as a chess consultant and then as an editor and literature head of l’autre Europe He is known for his use of various genres, literary forms and wordplay, and this book is a perfect example of that as it plays with the crime genre and uses a lot of wordplay as we go to Post Communist Prague. A cat and Mouse that maybe is more about the appearance of things than things happening. She could have lifted her skirt, mused Dyk. Just for a second, what harm would it have done her? There was no one else around.

She could have shown me her pussy and I would have told her how to get to the Academy. Maybe she wasn’t wearing panties either.
What harm would it have done her? Third right. Serves her right.
Not that Dyk had anything against beetles. At one point, in the depths of the last century, he had even had a collection of them and gone to the park every Sunday with a pair of tweezers, a pincushion with various sizes of safety pins, and a bottle of ink with a screw-on top. Most of his collection consisted of ground beetles and pine sawyers.

Dyks thoughts after he’d been ask directions worrying but does it meean more!

The book opens with annotations of a chess match, then we meet Viktor Dyk as he is sitting on a bench as is asked for directions from a tourist or a student, but then there are a few unsettling comments after that, and that is how we are launched into this odd crime book well, is it a crime book the other main character is an inspector Lebeda in fact this is like a game of chess as we move on Dyk we find has never really grown close to his son. What we get is a chess game of a crime novel, or is it a crime novel. With a rape of a student, she is a  tourist on her way to an exhibition of Warhol pictures, then a band of gipsies. Also, some graffiti appears on walls with a political nature to them, a mix of satire of the time the book was written just after Czech gained its freedom, two men in a chess-like chase who is who and what is the truth.

.Vilém Lebeda walked down Old Post Office Street and headed for a vegetable stand to buy some tomatoes. A few days earlier, he had decided to take a stab at making his own tomato juice. The rotten tomatoes were carefully tucked away underneath the good ones, an effect of the last revolution; under the old regime they didn’t bother with such formalities. Lebeda bought two kilos of tomatoes from a grumpy man with dirty nails and then went on his way. Two- and four-legged beasts, dubious creatures of various genders and faiths, moved sluggishly through the sunbaked streets. The retirees’ club resided on the ground floor of a nondescript prewar apartment building on Halek Street.

The other main character this passage made me smile the making tomato juice bit.

This is a clever book that plays with the form of a book. You get this as its writer has translated a lot of leading French experimental writers to Czech Queneau, Simon, Beckett and also a number of experimental Czech writers into French. This is a chess match of a book. Each chapter is like a square of prose itself a little gem that, like a game of chess, you never quite see how it is going to end is it even a crime novel yes there is evidence of a crime, but is it there to be solved or is it just about the post soviet period and what happened. All is revealed but is it I loved this it is a playful book that makes you, as the reader, think about thevents as we get other stories and other characters in the short choppy chapters. This is a mix of Noir, hardboiled crime comedy and Prague if Kingsley Amis and Agathe Christie had a bastard love child that had been abandoned at a platform on the Orient Express like Prague, he’d written this book weaned on a diet of chess and his parent’s novels they’d spat this book out. A gem from the Dalkey Archive

Winston score – +A fun and playful book in post-Soviet Prague as a twisted crime novel with two main characters