The rediscovered novel The Shadow by the screenwriter of It Is Necessary to Kill Sekal
The first and last prose work by screenwriter Jiří Křižan (1941-2010). The story of an orphaned country boy brought up by an almost old-worldly righteous grandfather, interspersed with "stupid" stories from his military service in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP). An extremely evocative narrative that gives an almost physical sense of what it is like to grow up on the margins of society - as a "class enemy" branded by political arbitrariness, and therefore a worthless, "former human being".
Křižan wrote this narrative with strongly autobiographical elements when he was 27 years old, but he did not live to see it published in his native language: At the beginning of the 1970s, the columnar proofreading was swept away by the normalisation purges and in the ferment of the end of the millennium all efforts to make it accessible to readers came to nothing.
Now the Shadow is finally seeing the light of day. This was not done simply out of an obligation to repay a debt to literary history, nor in an attempt to monetise an unknown work by a well-known author, but because it is an extraordinary text that has lost none of its relevance and impact in half a century.
