Metafyzický kurník

Metaphysical Chicken, an autobiographical text between an intimate notebook, a philosophical meditation and a prose poem, takes the reader to a rural setting in Normandy, where the protagonist has recently bought a house. In his backyard, Xavier Galmiche observes and records the lively life of sheep, turkeys, ducks, martens, and other co-inhabitants, but especially chickens. His view alternates with chapters in which the hen narrator develops and confronts the human's reflections with a view from below. The theme of a return to nature, which Galmiche also reflects on the social and political level, leads him in precisely observed post-cuts to serious and hilarious meditations on our place in the world, the transmission of essential values, gender issues, subliminal channels of communication and the last things of man.

The book won the prestigious Décembre Prize in France and is the first Czech translation of a literary text by a renowned author who is still known in the Czech environment mainly as a bohemian and translator (J. A. Komenský, K. H. Mácha, J. Weil, B. Hrabal, J. Vladislav, etc.).

Czech edition