Rustic Baroque

Farms owned by the same families for centuries were taken away. He makes his living by compiling family trees and digging in the archives, sometimes going back to Austrian-Hungarian times. His work entails a lot of travel in the small villages of the beautiful south Bohemian countryside, where some houses are built in the local, rustic baroque style. Things start slowly and are colored by the typical sarcastic but good-tempered Czech humor. The tension mounts when a client wants to dig up dirt on a political opponent and hires Pavel as one of the best in the archive business, promising a large sum of money.

Here, the characters are forced to reflect on how to deal with the totalitarian heritage: Should they forgive or seek revenge for past humiliations?

Who will get restitution for a nationalized property or get rejected? The pace hastens to a surprise ending, a romance with an amateur genealogist complicates things, and the reader is left with no easy answers to these questions. The translation by Gale A. I think the perception changes from generation to generation and I think young people are interested in it today.

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English Editorial Services In addition to the interest in these topics from the Czech public, Rustic Baroque quickly gained interest abroad as well. The English translation, though, will hopefully introduce this less known topic to an audience that maybe had very different historical experiences:.

But those are all European countries, which known about these kinds of topics. Obviously, this topic will be much less familiar in some places like Britain or the US. But, at the same time, this cultural and historical context of Central European may be interesting to those audiences, because it is exotic and very particular.

It was a subject that was really interesting for me, I think partially because we have a sort of similar background. I also come from a rural area. I grew up on a family farm in Wisconsin. We were both working in the financial sector at the time, because I am a former banker as well.

And once I took a look at it, I felt that this a book really deserves to be brought to an English-speaking audience. Of course, relating the cultural and historical context of rural mid-century Czechoslvakia to readers who may have very little experience with the subject matter or the region was not simple. My favorite writers are Steinbeck and Hemingway, and their writing tends to be very direct, I would say. Of course few successful novels are without some romantic twist in the story.

In Rustic Baroque, the romance is more than subtle, and essentially unfulfilled, but it does add to the emotional impact of the book. They used to kill unwanted babies in the farmhouses there. I found it in the old records. And the place also has the highest incidence of people being hanged far and wide. What the characters believe and feel, whether accurate or not, trumps everything else.

Whenever love or at least romance , or honor, or revenge, or some combination of them are involved, the truth can prove to be elusive and, at times, maddeningly squishy. The moral triumph of the farmer not hating his neighbors and government despite what they did to him may mean nothing to someone whose family went through similar circumstances and are unable to forgive.

Morality to them may mean righting wrongs, setting the past straight.

For anyone beginning to read the novel, there is a helpful list of major characters on page Posted by Dwight at 5: Thank you for writing about this - I'd never have heard about it otherwise and it sounds exactly what I want to read. Off to hunt down a copy. I saw a mention of this elsewhere a couple of days ago and was intrigued.

Your review makes it sound even better - thanks: Hopefully both of you will like it.

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It's an intriguing read perfect descriptor , to say the least. It reveals, piece by piece, and sometimes it's difficult to keep the overall picture in mind. Fortunately the author helps a lot at key points. I obviously enjoyed it and it ended up, ironically, providing a rejoinder to the Saramago I'm reading.

But more on that later I'm near the end now and I'm enjoying it , but I have to say that I'm finding it fairly poor. Did you have issues with this?