“This strange and beautiful existential encyclopaedia of the everyday is a lesson in modesty inflicted upon our sense of self”
MILAN KUNDERA
"An absorbing collection of short prose texts (...) probing the fabulous details of everyday life (...) Král's succinct texts are persuasive; they haunt the mind, thereafter influencing our perceptions"
France Magazine
MILAN KUNDERA
"An absorbing collection of short prose texts (...) probing the fabulous details of everyday life (...) Král's succinct texts are persuasive; they haunt the mind, thereafter influencing our perceptions"
France Magazine
"Taking on nearly anything that pertains to our daily experience, Král's elegant and incisive meditations vary in length from a couple of pages to a mere sentence (...) Intimate with French life yet also at one remove from it because of his background, Král hints at the metaphysical ramifications of whatever he comes across"
JOHN TAYLOR Times Literary Supplement
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Working Knowledge, over the course of one hundred brief and evanescent texts, Král brings together, as his compatriot Milan Kundera writes in his introduction, “this strange and beautiful existential encyclopaedia of the everyday”.
Whether describing twilight, a toothpick, the ritual of shaving or the act of going upstairs, his gaze is ingenuous, humble, amazed. Mute objects, fleeting gestures, changeless passions: Král forces us to look at them anew. Each limpid, graceful essay is a brief voyage of discovery in which lowly objects and everyday actions, so often unobserved, are transfigured. Petr Král has the unerring ability to perceive, to catch the commonplace by surprise and with the unsettling clarity see beyond the everyday to the fabric of life beneath.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETR KRÁL, born in Czechoslovakia in 1941, was a member of the Czech surrealist movement alongside Vratislav Effenberger and the poet Vítezslav Nezval. He moved to Paris in 1968, where in the forty years since he has gained a considerable reputation as a prolific poet, essayist and film critic. He has also written a remarkable two-volume work on the burlesque comedies of the silent era. Petr Král lives and works in Paris and Prague where he returned in 2008.
Introduction by Milan Kundera
Introduction by Milan Kundera
Translated from the French by prize winning translator Frank Wynne
Cover Illustration: film still from Coffee & Cigarettes courtesy of Jim Jarmusch
ISBN 978 1 901285 73 4
160pp
