BIG LOVE – A novel by Balla
Publications
BIG LOVE – A novel by Balla
(jointly translated from the Slovak Veľká láska)
Jantar Publishing, London, ISBN 978-0-9933773-5-8, October 2019
“But the key role in making Balla’s – and Dobrakovová’s – fiction so readable for a British audience is played by the translators, Julia and Peter Sherwood. With their linguistic skills and perfect pitch, they have done as much for the international reputation of Slovak prose as any single Slovak writer.” – Donald Rayfield, reviewing Bellevue and Big Love, Literary Review, October 2019
“This short novella is not only a sharp witted critique of contemporary post-socialist society in Slovakia, in the form of a fondly satirical take on its bureaucratic ineptness and literary pretensions, but it is also an endearing and all too recognizable romantic comedy of the kind that actually exists in real life more often than in the movies.” Joseph Schreiber on roughghosts, October 2019
“Though Balla, one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary novelists, has been compared to Kafka, he might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret (Israeli author of The Nimrod Flipout and multiple other collections of surreal short stories), given the thoroughly ironic, often absurdly amusing, take on contemporary life that characterises his work. […] Julia and Peter Sherwood do excellent work in co-translation (the presence of two different voices is non-existent), and evidently take pleasure in the text’s many ridiculous and amusing moments, as the spunk of the English version shows: the future, for example, is described somewhat presciently as ‘a total storm of dickheadedness’. Andreea Scridon, The London Magazine, October 2019
Link to buy here
