Seeing People Off

Café Hyena is a traditional café in the centre of Bratislava where tourists mix with regulars and lovers. Elza, a young writer, lives with her older partner Ian in Petržalka, in the 1990s the largest housing estate in Central Europe, where loneliness goes round in circles, thin walls cheapen intimacy and time is measured by the beeping of supermarket tills. The couple escape its banality by spending their time with friends in the old town, at the café where the ideas and ambitions of local artists reach beyond the local. Told in fifteen segments of short scenes, in the first and third person, the book is about how important it is to see off and protect the people we love, especially on the way through the Petržalka labyrinth.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

124 pages in the original

Genres

Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

Slovakia, 1990s

First published

2008 by Koloman Kertész Bagala

Author's age

34 when first published

ISBN

9788089129980 (original)

9781937512590 (Two Dollar Radio, United States)

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