Lit in Translation

Journey to the South

Cesta na jih

Michal Ajvaz (born 1949)

Translated by Andrew Oakland

English editions

In English

* Affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate and a Bookshop.org affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases. The price stays the same for you.

The narrator, staying in a small village on Crete's southern coast, falls into conversation with a young man who explains how he came there all the way from Prague. He had set out to solve the strange deaths of two brothers, one of them killed on stage during a ballet based on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and as a devotee of Kant he vowed to find the murderer. The hunt branches into story after story, carrying the reader to Moscow, Boston and Mexico City as well as into landscapes of dream and imagination, and into passages that read like witty philosophical essays.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form
Novel
Length
539 pages in the original
Genres
Crime, Speculative (assigned by AI)
Set in
Greece, Czechia, Russia, United States, Mexico
First published
2008 by Druhé město
Author's age
59 when first published
ISBN

9788072272785 (original)

9781628974447 (Dalkey Archive Press, United States)