Case closed

Following the success of 2005’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Patrik Ouředník again confounds expectations with what seems, on the surface, to be a detective novel...Cente ...

Following the success of 2005’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Patrik Ouředník again confounds expectations with what seems, on the surface, to be a detective novel...Centered on an elderly retiree and his intellectual adversary, the shrewd Inspector Lebeda, Case Closed is filled with all the expected elements of a thriller—murder, rape, suicide!—but soon reveals itself as a wily and sophisticated parable about the dangers of language itself, in which the author takes aim at human nature with a devastating arsenal of genre-mixing, wordplay, and whimsical, biting satire.