Jana Ndiaye Berankova
Jana Ndiaye Berankova currently works at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, studied and lived abroad for many years, including at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Columbia University in New York. In her debut novel, she develops a distinctive mode of writing that remains relatively unusual in Czech literature, drawing on her knowledge of French philosophy, the history of Western left-wing movements, the theory and history of architecture, the work of Walter Benjamin, Central European avant-garde movements, and French prose.
Combining dreams, memories, reflections on particular places, and an all-encompassing perspective unbound by conventional coordinates of time and space, the novella The Promise of Future Happiness turns prose into an experimental instrument of thought.
The Promise of Future Happiness
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In contemporary Prague, a city suspended between memory and amnesia, the narrator is trying to find meaning again after the collapse of a relationship and of her own certainties — in writing, in love, and in the world around her. Her life is disrupted by an encounter with Nino, an ageing revolutionary living in a kind of inner exile, a man who embodies vanished ideals and dreams of a different future. Their walks through the city gradually turn into an intimate and intellectual dialogue about the past, memory, and a world that seems to have lost its capacity to believe in change. Prague emerges as a city of paradoxes, where high culture mingles with kitsch, history with tourism, ruins of love with ruins of communism, and grand ideas with the banality of everyday life. The Promise of Future Happiness is a subtle, dreamlike novel about the meeting of two lonely people, the fragile boundary between reality and imagination, and whether it is still possible to believe in love, radical political transformation, and the future in an age that seems to have come after the end of history.