City of Torment Format: Paperback

City of Torment is, on one level, a family and generational novel, conveyed through the complex voice of a first-person female narrator whose subjectivity becomes elaborately intertwined with the main protagonist, Eliška Beránková (Lamb). Eliška/Daniela is searching above all for her dead father, but also for her dead mother and ultimately for herself. At the same time, on a more abstract level, Hodrová introduces a feminine structural dimension to a theme especially prevalent in 20th-century prose – the novel as a self-conscious genre, openly exploring the relationship of the author to her text. Hodrová’s trilogy represents a distinct contemporary Czech voice in women’s experimental writing, a genre first introduced to anglophone readers by Virginia Woolf.

Daniela Hodrová (b. 5 July 1946) is a prize-winning author and literary scholar of French, Russian and comparative literature.

She has written 9 novels, one ‘alternative guidebook’ (Prague, I See a City, Jantar 2011 and 2015) and several academic monographs on various aspects of the European novel, in particular the novel of initiation, as well as mythopoetics of the city. Her novel Spiral Sentences won the most prestigious Czech literary award Magnesia Litera in 2016. She was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2012 and the (Czech) State award for Literature in 2011.

Her novels have been translated into 10 languages.