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[excerpt]
book view
series: limited editions
also by the author:
The Absolute Gravedigger
Woman in the Plural
Valerie and Her
Week of Wonders
A Prague Flâneur
Edition 69
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the automaton
by Vítězslav Nezval
translated from the Czech by Jed Slast
collages by Jindřich Štyrský
One day in the middle of a Prague street a discarded divan appears holding a puppet within, a dormant "mechanized man." Once revived
he runs off, but the young girl who looked into his eyes has fallen in love, the “mad love” of a chance encounter.
The girl eventually marries a "proofreader" whose outlook is the epitome of conformist. Her life is so constrained
she feels like an automaton herself, with no will of her own, until she finds her own agency and “negotiates” a modus vivendi
with her husband that will allow her to live. Mashing up elements from E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," Maldoror, Frankenstein,
and a truly weird take on the folktale "Bluebeard," The Automaton is a fantastic parable about freedom from conventional
notions of love and fidelity, where the human and the nonhuman freely mingle and procreate and produce offspring as bizarre
and unsettling as any Surrealist juxtaposition.
The Automaton forms "Part III" of the novel Chain of Fortune, but is simultaneously a discrete story on its own.
It is paired for this edition with selections from Jindřich Štyrský's extensive collage series Moveable Cabinet, whose
artificial creatures are directly referenced by Nezval in the text.
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ISBN
13 x 18 cm, 84 pp., cloth
9 color illustrations + illus. endpapers
printed on 150g Munken Print
limited edition of 700
fiction
forthcoming
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