Case Closed

The Project, 2, 2017

An atypical thiller, that is at times metaphysical and that does not limit itself to respecting the canonical rules of its category, but blends diverse genres, such as social satire, meditations on the limits of the novel, ambiguities of communication, and is above all a reflection on the language which is central in the novel. The protagonist is Vilém Lebeda, the chief inspector of an ordinary post-communist Prague neighbourhood who, while investigating a number of suspicious cases, runs into a surly and misanthropic pensioner, Viktor Dyk, whom he discovers, was involved in a murder that had been filed many years before as an unsolved case... It contains all the ingredients for an explosive thiller (fires, murders, rapes and so on), but Ourednik subverts the genre and creates an acute and sophisticated parable on the ambiguities of the language, in which he investigates human nature by means of a vast arsenal of genres, such as puns and satire.