When Daniela Hodrová was writing Podobojí in the seventies, she had no idea that she was just beginning to build a novel world out of memories, myths, stories of characters real and fictional, famous and unknown, which would not close with the end, that together with Kukla and Theta they would create a trilogy. With an allusion to Dante, she then called it The Tormented City. In the space of Prague, the purgatory-city, the stories of the living are interwoven with the stories of the dead who live on in places connected to their lives. In Théta, the novel turns into an autobiography of sorts, opening with the dying of the father and ending with a journey to the underworld. The trilogy, first published as a whole in 1999, came to a close then, but the novel's world did not cease to exist. We found ourselves in it again in Comedy, Evocation and Twisted Sentences, where it grew to include more grotesque and poignant stories. From wherever we enter this world, it provides us with a complete account every time. It is almost certain that this "world of sentences", as M. Jankovič called it, will cease to exist only with the last sentence of the author's last novel. And perhaps not even then.
Czech edition