Ota Filip: Sousedé a ti druzí (Sąsiedzi i ci inni)

Translation: Jan Stachowski, ATUT Wrocław 2009

We all have our neighbours. We spy one them across the garden fence in order to figure out what kind of unusual tomatoes are they growing next door. We suck in the smell of Sunday’s roast goose or with a cup on the wall listen to why are the people next door verging at the point of a divorce. Oskar Měšťáček has got his own neighbours in the book Sousedé a ti druzí a Czech writer and emigrant who moved into a picturesque Bavarian town five years ago. In the blind street Im Krahwinkel (in English we would probably say “in the middle of nowhere”) he is a witness to seemingly ordinary neighbourhood squabbles but gradually begins to reveal many dark or sad mysteries, curiosities and depravities which are hidden behind the masks of orderly citizens of this Alpine resort.
Ota Filip is one of the principal characters of the Czech exile literature. In 1974 was forced to emigrate to Germany, where he worked as a publicist, commentator and lector of the publishing house Fischer Verlag. He is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Arts.