Description

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An introduction to the work of acerbic Slovak writer Peter Macsovszky.

Simon Blef, who comes from “a small, stifling country without a sea” in some corner of Europe, has gone to live in the Netherlands. There he has found a wife and hopes he may yet find work. He is making preparations: he carries around a notebook and jots down his thoughts. One day he would like to write a novel, but in the meantime, he records, embellishes, invents, and combines what he sees with what he dreams: the happy, hard-working Dutch, with their seventy-year-old hippies—the “superannuated generation of rockers”— and their new “sexless generation,” as well as the tourists and immigrants from beyond the seven seas.

Set in a single day, Making Skeletons Dance is full of impressionistic musings, in equal measure mordant and humorous. Simon has left his small unhappy country to get away from the past—but how is it that the past is so devilishly resourceful, liable to turn up in any Amsterdam pub? As the afternoon wears on, the drama of his life unfolds in fascinating detail, be it comedy or tragedy, or both.

About the Author

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Peter Macsovszky writes in Slovak and Hungarian. He is the author of various collections of experimental lyrical texts, and his novel Tantalópolis received the Anasoft Litera Prize in 2015.

John Minahane was born in Ireland and has lived and worked in Slovakia since 1996. He has been translating Slovak literature into English for twenty years.

Praise For…

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“Macsovszký’s book is full of skeletons: they are not only in the title and the English quote from the Indian author’s book on the title page, in the fascinating paintings of famous masters, they appear in childhood memories, they are present in the narrator's spontaneously jumping imaginations. They are mostly made of paper, they sway in the breeze and directly or indirectly proclaim their paper truth about human life, until finally they change into philosophical skeletons at the end of the novel, pulling down all the reason of this highly sophisticated work, in which not only the narrator’s sarcastic humor freezes, but also apparently the blood of the reader.”
— Alexander Halvoník, Slovak Literature Centre

“Poet, novelist and translator Peter Macsovszky is without a doubt one of the most outstanding and stimulating authors of his generation.”
— Michal Jareš, Pravda