As the title and the artwork on the cover suggest, these are humorous stories that will entertain and delight us despite the slightly bitter flavour that some of them have. This collection of short prose does, in fact, hold up a mirror to us and sometimes makes fun of things around us that are rather laughable.
Satire is the best weapon that the author Pavel Šmidrkal likes to use effectively. He has experienced everything he has written, so to speak, first-hand and, as a good observer of his surroundings, he has processed the themes offered to him by everyday life in a lively language into dozens of peppery and pointed stories. He is no stranger to anything human and can make fun of even such a serious topic as the current demolition of monuments or renaming of streets.
The humorous book was wittily illustrated by the well-known cartoonist and humorist Miloslav Martenek, who together with Pavel Šmidrkal form a well-known authorial duo, as we have already seen several times. For example, in the popular South Bohemian Picture Gallery Záliv, where Martenek's drawings and illustrations were presented by Pavel Šmidrkal in a curatorial role.
We have no other choice but to applaud both of them for their wonderful book From the Puddle Under the Gutter and to recommend it warmly to our esteemed readership in the current cheerless times. The collection of humorous prose presented in these lines was published and printed by Nová tiskárna Pelhřimov.
Curriculum vitae
Pavel Šmidrkal was born on 3 December 1953 in Tábor. He is a talented and hard-working publicist, art historian, gallerist, curator and writer. He graduated from the Secondary School of Industry and studied cultural education and art history in 1980 - 82.
From 1977 to 2009, he worked in various cultural positions in military institutions. Among other things, Šmidrkal prepared art exhibitions. Since 2010, he has been curator of the Želeč Picture Gallery, the Záliv Gallery in the spa town of Bechyně and the small Tudy Gallery at the research room of the Military Central Archive. Pavel Šmidrkal has held hundreds of exhibitions and published dozens of exhibition catalogues. He has also written a number of publications about visual artists in the unique Pelhřimov edition of Probuzené palety.
He has worked with the media since the mid-1970s. Pavel Šmidrkal published his articles and contributions in Mladá fronta, Beseda and the then South Bohemian Pravda. He entered literature with short stories in the magazines Československý voják, Květy and the popular satirical magazine Dikobraz.
He has written four books so far. Short story collection Barbarians , It's gone., fairy tales What rustles in the leaves and humoresques From the puddle to the gutter. In the edition Awakened pallets is one of the tribal authors, he wrote a dozen art historical works here, such as Jirko Trnka, I liked you, Karol Molnár - painter of three countries or Lines of desire - nude in fine art and photography.
Pavel Šmidrkal is a recipient of significant awards, including the Order of the Cross of Merit of the Minister of Defence for his work in the field of culture.
Ivan Cerny
PHOTO - archive, gnews.cz
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