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ceilings
by Zuzana Brabcová
translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická
frontispiece by Rybka Ivanko Brabcova
Kin to the work of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn, Ceilings is a polyphonic novel that takes place in a mental
hospital in Prague where the "narrator" is undergoing detox treatment for painkiller and alcohol abuse. As the border blurs
between inner experience and the outer world, between reality and dream, as the walls and ceilings hemming in the desire for
freedom fantastically break open as if into the unknown, what is explored in flights of imagination is the determination or
inability to "come out of oneself," to recognize the preponderance of the other in a multifarious world that requires our
engagement, no matter how ambivalent.
Magnesia Litera Prose Book of the Year for 2013
The ceiling that forms the horizon of someone lying in a hospital bed becomes a metaphor for the mingling of the past
with the present, of phantasmagoria with the real. It is the very ceiling of reality, with a hole yawning with hallucinatory visions and
memories, passage through which only leads to the next, ultimate ceiling of the self.
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iLiteratura.cz
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Zuzana Brabcová's novel is a literary event, an extreme work, exceptional in its concision and poetry. |
— Petr A. Bílek Respekt
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ISBN 9788088628057
226 pp., 14 x 20 cm
softcover with flaps
1 b/w frontispiece
cover image by Unica Zürn
fiction : novel
RRP: $19.50 • £12.50
publication:
April 2025
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