Ad acta

About the book
Original title Ad acta
First published 2006
Publisher Torst, Prague
Pages 153
ISBN number 80-7215-290-4


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Rights sold to
France Allia - Paris
Hungary Kalligram - Budapest
USA Dalkey Archive Press - Chicago
Bulgaria Prozoretz - Sofia
Serbia Dereta - Beograd
Italy Keller editore - Rovereto
Egypt Al Arabi - Cairo
Latvia Petergailis - Riga
The Netherlands Zirmiri Press - Amsterdam
Macedonia Magor Publishing - Skopje
Romania Editura Vremea - Bucharest
Poland Fundacja Pogranicze - Sejny
Turkey Epona - Istanbul


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Synopsis

The complete review's Review

Case Closed jumps back and forth between a number of characters and storylines (with some overlap), moving quickly across forty short chapters. The first chapter is entirely in what appears to be chess notation -- and similarly there's a lot of quick back-and-forth repartee in the dialogue-heavy book. The novel is also full of games (including some more chess), clues, mysteries, and ambiguity.

Case Closed is -- arguably -- ostensibly a mystery/thriller: some crimes are committed and investigated (arson, rape, a murder from forty years ago), and one of the central characters is a policeman, chief inspector Vilém Lebeda. But this very multilayered novel is also a humorous-critical look at the Czech character and nation over the past decades, into the post-Communist present -- as well as an entirely literary game.

Life in and as fiction, and philosophical quandaries (right down to the question: "Are we real ?"): Ouředník piles it on thick and fast. It works -- indeed, it's tremendously appealing -- because he shows such a light, deft touch. Case Closed is terribly playful, but not quite fatally so.

Ouředník has a sharp wit (which only occasionally becomes too blunt in his defamation of the Czech character), and there are times when it almost seems a shame that Case Closed isn't a simpler, more conventional novel, stripped of its metafictional conceits. Still, it's fairly satisfying in both its conventional and metafictional aspects, and if the mix isn't always ideal it does work, for the most part. Clever and enjoyable, and certainly worthwhile.



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