A Scrupulous Account of Post–Prague Spring Life

“By turns cunning and brutally honest, Slovak literary man Jan Rozner’s fictionalized autobiography also works as a depiction of his times,” Siegfried Mortkowitz wrote about the book Seven Days to the Funeral by Jan Rozner, translated from the Slovak into English by Julia and Peter Sherwood and published by Karolinum Press in 2024.

Seven Days to the Funeral is the fictionalised memoir of Ján Rozner, a leading Slovak journalist, critic, dramaturg, and translator. Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská were champions of the Prague Spring and were blacklisted after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When Jesenská died in 1972, her funeral became a political event and attendees faced recriminations.

As Siegfried Mortkowitz continues:

In the indispensable afterword, Ivana Taranenkova quotes Rozner’s Slovak publisher as saying that he wanted “ ‘to write a Joycean novel, without paragraph breaks, comprised of long sentences, a continuous narrative.’ ”

Read the full article here.

Seven Days to the Funeral, by Jan Rozner. Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. Karolinum Press, 2024. 488 pages.