Gravelarks

Jan Křesadlo(1926–1995) was the pseudonym chosen by Dr Václav Jaroslav Karel Pinkava, a Czech emigré psychologist who settled in Britain with his wife and four children after the 1968 invasion of his native Czechoslovakia. He worked as a clinical psychologist in Colchester until his early retirement in 1982, when he turned to full-time writing. GraveLarks, his first novel, was originally published by Josef Škvorecky’s émigré publishing house `68 Publishers in Toronto. Pinkava was also active in choral music and mathematical logic discovering the many-valued logic algebra which bears his name.

Winner of the 1984 Egon Hastovsky prize; 'GraveLarks successfully employs Menippean satire, characterized by a fragmented narrative, frequent shifts of stylistic register and point of view, and the wish to lampoon not so much an individual but a general state of mind … Needless to say, the novel’s relevance is not limited to a specific time and place' - Andrei Rogatchevski, The Times Literary Supplement; 'GraveLarks is a quite remarkable novel – a lot of fun even, despite the sour accompanying taste. This is a wonderfully lively text, and while Křesadlo bashes the system of those times he treats it as an aberration that should be examined and understood and not simply ignored or glossed over. A fascinating work, in many respects, and a very good novel.' - M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review; 'A complex torrent of black humour mixed with rollicking slapstick clowning, of sexual exploitation mixed with warm family love, of sharp, pointed, observations mixed with bizarre and fantastic episodes reminiscent of Meyrink and Kafka.' - John Howard, Wormwood; 'Original, shocking, truthful' - Josef Škvorecky, prize-winning novelist, publisher, academic; 'The greatest post-war Czech writer' - Peter Pišťanek, prize-winning novelist and cognac connoisseur