Lucie Vaňková
Lucie Vaňková studied Journalism at Charles University, and Scriptwriting and Dramaturgy at FAMU. She has worked as a cleaner and teahouse attendant as well as an idea maker in a digital agency. Currently, she makes a living writing scripts for non-commercial films and commercial TV shows, such as daily soap Ulice (The Street), comedy Hasičárna Telecí (The Telecí Fire Station), and crime series Dáma a král (The Lady and the King). She was born and lives in Prague. She is married and has a son named Antonín.
The Wanderings of a Dead Fish
August 2022, 312 pages
A surreal novel filled with humor and pop-culture references, including the myth of Milan Kundera and the beauty of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity
Ishtvan Mackerel was born one September afternoon in Prague in the Tram Number Seventeen from a poorly researched newspaper article – his father was a blatant lie, and his mother a lousy journalist. He has nothing but his lucky fish scale and a document proving that he is the intellectual property of one Methodius H., who claims this is all some sort of a mistake. Ishtvan must quickly learn how to navigate the hectic postmodern world while figuring out where he came from and who he is.
Convinced that he is the only one of his kind, he finds a spark of hope when he reads Kundera’s Immortality and learns about the character of Agnes, born from the single gesture of an elderly lady by a pool. Ishtvan knows he must find Agnes.
He starts his quest, which leads him to Paris, Geneva or Strasburk and brings him on the path he hopefully can become a real human at the end. But first, he has to deal with the fact that he is made just of the opinions and expectations of the people around him. But maybe we all are, aren’t we?
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“An entertaining and suspenseful story in the style of Laurent Binet’s novels (HHhH, The Seventh Function of Language) or the translated Czech bestseller A Theory of Strangeness by Pavla Horáková.”