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[ excerpt ]
book view
also by the author:
Missing
Seven Times the
Leading Man
The Hideout
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the arsonist
by Egon Hostovský
translated from the Czech by Christopher Morris
frontispiece by Tomáš Fafek
Awarded the Czechoslovak State Prize for Literature in 1936, The Arsonist explores the world of youth against the backdrop of
a small eastern Bohemian border town being menaced by an invisible firebug. Time and fire, their ability to reshape and destroy, are central.
Encoded in echo, wind, and smoke — in the gesture and in the whisper — the true nature of events is too intangible and fleeting, too pregnant
with the unknown, to provide any genuine certainty, and this is the real source of the townsfolk's terror. Their misguided attempts to identify
the elusive arsonist ultimately reveal the emptiness and inflexibility of their own lives. One of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century
Czech letters, Hostovský’s mix of mysticism, irony, and wit, all leavened by the influence of Expressionism on his early work, results in a
richly textured narrative amid an atmosphere of growing peril that serves as a harbinger of the catastrophe to come. This is the first
English translation.
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I was utterly gripped and absorbed by “The Arsonist”
from start to finish. On the level of what is almost a mystery story,
it’s thoroughly engrossing.
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— Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings
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The Arsonist is unsettling on multiple levels, and Hostovský is particularly good at the layering –
including that of the various passions and disappointments of the two Simon teens. He weaves a lot into the relatively
short novel, and it holds up very well.
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— M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review
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... deceptively quiet Zbečnov seethes just beneath the surface with the kind of smoldering, smothered urges
eptiomized by adolescent angst. Though Hostovský doesn't reveal the firebug's face until the last chapter, this is hardly a
suspense novel. The book's surface mystery story serves mostly as a mirror and backdrop for the psychological action that is
its theme and emotional core. By the book's close, fire, darkness, suspicion and secrecy have twisted into a network of associations
that illuminate both Kamil's troubled family and the entire town. |
— The Prague Post
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Hostovský produced novels that were near masterpieces. |
— Arne Novák
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The Arsonist is a spare, elegant meditation on unseen terror, given form in random fires within a small town in eastern Bohemia as Czech and Prussian anti-Semitism erupts. |
— Literární noviny
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ISBN 9788088628101
180 pp., 135 x 195 mm
softcover with flaps
2 b/w illus.
fiction : novel
publication:
hardcover
December 1996
softcover
UK: May 2025
US: June 2025
Order directly:
airmail postage worldwide
& handling incl.
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e-book [978-80-88628-36-1]
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