Snidane na refyzi
The Breakfast on Safety Island
(Hynek, 1998)
The slow action of these simple stories and the concentration on the main epic line enables the author to focus on the internal developments and upon the emotions of the hero. The protagonist each of these stories is called Pavel. In each case, though he is not one and the same character, he is always a fragile, melancholy young man from the countryside of the South Bohemia. Many of these short stories have been dramatized for radio broadcasting.
Dreveny nuz
The Wooden Knife
(Host 2004) >>> excerpt
It´s a collection of twelve short stories which are connected through the environment of the
South Bohemian countryside. Small human dramas of everyday´s life which flow like a river without pathos or spectacularity. The time period between the first story (Memories of a Village Dancing in 1986) and the last story (Melancholic Leaves From the Autumn Trees of Democracy) lasts for 10 years. What does this period of time mean in the ordinary life of the main figures?
Fotbalove deniky
Football Diaries
(Host 2007)
In June 2006, just as the football World Cup is beginning in Germany, instead of journeying around the German stadiums as originally planned, due to a strange coincidence, Honza finds himself in a car with a 19-year old girl. He has known her for just a week but he is much closer to her than he first thinks. Instead of German motorways, there are minor roads in need of repair; instead of hotels, there are mostly dusty, blue-collar lodging houses and even a sleepover on the airbed. Simona and Honza's curious summer trip seems to be endless, going round and round in circles, bordered by the results of the matches of the Czech National Team, with their hopes and disappointments. In this “football road movie” the feelings of a quadragenarian tackle more than the game of football. This man seemingly lacks nothing, but still he suffers from feelings of loneliness and emptiness.
In this novella, in contrast to his successful novel Rustic Baroque / Selský baroko, Jiri Hajicek does not get involved in heavy historical issues, but readers will find many typical things here from Hajicek´s rural writings.
Vzpomínky na jednu venkovskou tancovačku
(Host 2014)
Sketch of Two Girls
(Egon Schiele Artcentrum 2018)
Zlodeji zelenych koni
The Green Horse Rustlers
(Host 2001) >>> excerpt
Zlodeji zelenych koni
The Green Horse Rustlers
(Host 2015) >>> excerpt
Zlodeji zelenych koni
The Green Horse Rustlers (audiobook)
(One Hot Book 2022)
This novel is a present time story from the Czech countryside dealing with the long-lasting problem of illegal mining of Moldavite stones in the South Bohemia. Moldavites are original Czech semi-precious gem stones which are a result of a meteorite impact that occured 15 milion years ago. Moldvites were created through the fusion with earth material that sprayed out of the crater formed by that crash. They resemble green glass with peculiar distortions on the surface and they often have bubbles trapped inside.
This is a dramatic story of several Moldavite-diggers as they evolve in their uncontrolled passion for their quest. The story of their illegal search for the magic minerals is a backdrop for even more dramatic episodes dealing with relationships and emotions of these main characters, including friendship, love, betrayal and disappointment. The author´s style of writing is almost documentary and matter-of-fact, which makes his book even more thrilling.
The novel was translated into the Hungarian and was published by Magus (Budapest) in 2003.
Dobrodruzi hlavniho proudu
The Mainstream Adventurers
(Host 2002)
It´s a classic tale set in the real world of the 1990s in Bohemia. Pavel and Dominika get to know one another at the end of the 1980s, but the passion of their early love is followed by the gradual disintegration of their relationship. Both have the feeling that the political and social changes of 1989 in Czechoslovakia have created the space in which they can realize their dreams while Pavel is bitten by the business bug, believing this to be the area in which he will find himself, Dominika leaves for France to search for her relatives and uncover her roots. The novel's plot is packed with dramatic events in which we often encounter the political realities of the 1990s (including restitution, racketeering, bankruptcy, imprisonment, the opportunity to travel abroad to the west, something which was almost unheard of before the Velvet Revolution).
Hájicek's novel is vivid in its depictions in as much as that the author never allows himself to be drawn away from the authenticity of his setting, nor does he allow his gaze to be deflected from observation of the developments and changes that his heroes undergo, right up to the event which pitches them (as if) back to the beginning of their relationship. The novel, as a whole, pose – albeit in various mutations – a single question: is it possible to go back and start anew?
Selsky baroko
Rustic Baroque
(Host 2005) >>> excerpt
Selsky baroko
Rustic Baroque (audiobook)
(One Hot Book 2021)
The novel Rustic Baroque is built up in two time levels and presents a story from today´s Czech countryside and at the same time takes the reader back to the 1950s Czechoslovakia.
In the decade after 1948, when the Communist Regime seized power, the Czech countryside suffered the so-called „collectivisation“, a process of forced transformation of private farms into state-controlled co-operatives in compliance with the Soviet lines with the sole purpose of eliminating one whole social class: big private landowners. Through brutal coecion, intimidation, imprisonment as well as through provocation and arranged trials, the peasants were pressured to surrender their land and livestock to these newly established co-operatives.
Surprisingly, this matter, which was long tabooed and exclusively treated in a tendentious and biased maner in Communist Eastern Europe, didn´t receive much reflection after the fall of the Communist Regime.
The main character of the story is the genealogist, Pavel Stranansky, a middle-aged man who makes his living by compiling family trees, especially for wealthy emigrants looking for their roots in their native country. He mostly spends his time in archives and has collected an enormous database of people , birth and death records, blood ties and property relations in his notebook. His main workplace is the State Archive in the little town of Trebon in Southern Bohemia. It´s here that novel´s plot starts to unfold. It´s a story of crime and passion that takes place within two months of one hot summer. Pavel Stranansky searches for the denouncement letter written in the 1950s which brought several people to the Communist jail at that time. The surprise ending of the novel evokes questions of guilt, revenge and pardon.
– translated into the Hungarian (Kalligram, 2008)
– translated into the Italian (Centro Full Service, 2009)
– translated into the Croatian (Disput, 2011)
– translated into the English (Real World Press, 2012)
– translated into the Bulgarian (Izida, 2016)
Rybí krev
Fish Blood
(Host 2012)
Rybí krev
Fish Blood (audiobook)
(Radioservis / One Hot Book 2013)
TIn this novel the author continues his exploration of the Czech village. The theme of the displacement and demolition of a community in South Bohemia so that a nuclear power station can take its place in the late 1980s is certailnly a topical one that needs to be addressed at a time when the future of other villages is under threat - at any place in the world really. But Fish Blood is not any old "green novel"; above all it is an absorbing human story of three friends from a small village whom fate has scattered across the world. It is a story with strong echoes of longing for family cohesion, a story about the power of love and forgiveness.
– translated into the Macedonian (Begemot, 2014)
– translated into the Belarusian (Logvino, 2015)
– translated into the Polish (Ksiaskowe Klimaty, 2015)
– translated into the Bulgarian (Paradox, 2016)
– translated into the Serbian (Ammonite books, 2019)
– translated into Albanian (Ombra GVG, 2020)
– translated into the Slovenian (Didakta, 2023)
– translated into Italian (Keller 2023)
Dešťová hůl
The Rainstick
(Host 2016)
Jiří Hájíček follows his literary investigation of the Czech village of the past with a novel set in the present. Zbyněk, a land administrator, meets a former love he hasn’t seen for many years, in order to help her with an apparently simple property-related problem. Having returned to the country village in which he was born and grew up, Zbyněk is gradually apprised of the unclear circumstances of a land dispute; at the same time he becomes embroiled in personal and marital crisis. He struggles with insomnia, loses his way in the countryside and cadastral maps, while a crazy 18th-century rustic aviator hovers above him like an apparition. A turning point is reached when Zbyněk goes into battle with his face covered in war paint so as “not to wake up as someone else one day”.
– translated into Macedonian (Antolog, Skopje, 2018)
– translated into Polish (Ksiaskowe Klimaty, Wroclaw, 2018)
– translated into German (Karl Rauch, Düsseldorf, 2019)
– translated into Bulgarian (Izida, 2020)
Plachetnice na vinětách
Sailing Ships on Labels
(Host 2020)
Plachetnice na vinětách
Sailing Ships on Labels (audiobook)
(One Hot Book 2020)
Marie, a forty-seven-year-old divorced associate professor of literature, finds herself in her sister's half-empty apartment in Český Krumlov over the summer. She commutes from there to the countryside to visit her seriously ill parents and in her free time she wanders among the crowds of tourists through the streets of Krumlov. He meets a young book merchant, Filip. Their budding romance breathes the atmosphere of hot July and has numerous literary connotations. However, Marie mainly wants to mend relations with her sister and take care of her parents - a domineering father and a mild, devoted mother. And to come to terms with her loneliness. She sees it as being stuck in time, with memories from the past weighing on her - and the prospect of old age on the other side. In the family tradition of strong male role models, Mary reflects on what has been, while wondering how to live on and what to do with "Shakespearean love"…
– translated into German (Karl Rauch, Düsseldorf, 2021)
– translated into Macedonian (Slavika Libris, Skopje, 2021)
– translated into Latvian (Petergailis, Riga, 2022)
"Jiří Hájíček paints pictures of a colourfully fast-paced but somewhat empty present, in which historical memory has become diluted. At the same time, he is locally rooted in his native South Bohemia, where he grew up in a rural environment. This lived experience is one of his basic creative impulses."
Petr Hanuška, Hospodářské noviny (2020)
A man on the verge of combustion
Haiku from diary 2017-2018
(Host 2022)
The successful writer Jiří Hájíček (born 1967) is established in Czech literature mainly as an author of short stories and novels. However, he once started with verse. Even in recent years he has occasionally devoted himself to poetry, in the form of haiku, of which the Host publishing house brings this chamber collection entitled Man on the Verge of Burning. "I write the first words of the day on a piece of paper. Someone is doing sudoku in the morning to warm up their brain, I am writing haiku. The mind is strangely clouded and excited at the same time in the morning. It is scarce for words, and that is good for this kind of writing," says the author about his work. Insights and snapshots from life. Miniatures, fragments of days and stories, small impressions, atmospheres. Verses attributed to notes on train departures and readings, notes on "departures in love". A life concentrated in sharply cut images, "Hájíček otherwise", but well recognizable in its basic chords. A poetry civil, unpretentious, with a deep personal guarantee. The small, bibliophilic volume with colour illustrations by academic painter Matej Lipavský (b. 1985), elegantly edited by graphic artist Lucie Zajíčková, may attract not only the author's fans, but also many readers who do not usually seek out this genre.
The man under the black umbrella
(Host 2022)
The successful writer Jiří Hájíček is mainly established in Czech literature as a prose writer, author of short stories and novels. However, he once started with verse. Recently, he has also occasionally devoted himself to poetry, most often in the form of haiku, a classical Japanese form. In it he offers lyrical miniatures, fragments of days and stories, small impressions, atmospheres, inner stained glass. It is a poetry that is civil and unpretentious. It is a "Haiku otherwise", but recognizable in its basic chords. "Haiku" is like disappearing without big words somewhere on a road between fields, on the city streets or in the morning gloom of the kitchen. That's haiku for me. Zero stylization, no metaphors, just those few syllables and words and then silence..." says the prose writer with a lyrical soul.
A man on the verge of combustion
(Host 2022)
A new edition of the successful, reader-hyped 2018 edition.
