We had to read this mandatory at school, when compared to other Capek's book, this one was terribly boring...

Jest to średnia ocena trzech opowiadań.... Polecam "Meteor":), pozostałe dwa nie wywarły na mnie takiego wrażenia.

An amazing collection of novels. Like Beckett, without the crushing hopelessness (okay, maybe a little bit).

A triptych consisting of three ~150 pg novellas, each (according to the excellent preface) about identity, and the possibility of knowing a person. Well-written, but often dull. I didn't make it to the 3rd story.

Hordubal: dull and dry, regardless of the author’s philosophical intentions.

Meteor: structurally interesting, and eventually becomes engaging.

An Ordinary Life: radiant by the end, thanks to a number of ideas to which I am sympathetic.

Hordubal se mi líbil moc, hlavně ten jazyk, jména a Hordubalovy myšlené rozhovory - ****.
Povětroň mě nenadchnul - ***.
A Obyčejný život je naprosto geniální! *****

Čapek’s noetic (knowledge that transcends the five senses or inner wisdom) trilogy is a bold philosophical and narrative experiment spread across three riveting and enlightening novels. In Hordubal, a farmer returns from America to find himself usurped and cuckolded in his village by a popular farmhand. The novel is told from the perspective of the protagonist, the police, and the court and interrogates the impossibility of narrative ever viewing with crystal vision many complex psyches, and the ease with which time and others distort the “truth”. In Meteor, a comatose man who fell from the sky has his life reimagined by a nun, a clairvoyant, and a poet, in a playful novel that explores our imagination’s endless capacity to festoon the unknown with sexy lies. The pinnacle of the trilogy is An Ordinary Life, where a boring man’s life story is interrogated by a chorus of conflicting inner voices, unpicking the scabs left unexplored in the narrator’s attempt to sanitise the darker elements of his psyche. A total triumph of ideas and execution, Čapek’s work shares the restless need to examine the sham role of narrative in capturing what is “real” explored in Gilbert Sorrentino’s Pack of Lies trilogy, and reads as one of the most entertaining works to explore explicit philosophical ideas with flair, humour, and genuine nous.

2015 - Zatraceně dobrá povinná četba (kéž by taková byla každá).. Nemohu dát plný počet, protože se v každém z příběhů sem tam objevila část, kterou jsem se nemohla prokousat a víceméně mě nudila, ale jinak byly všechny tři příběhy svým způsobem dost silné a ohromně zajímavé, plné podnětných myšlenek..
Skvělá zkušenost.

2023 - Po letech vesměs souhlasím s předchozím vyjádřením. Jen je zajímavé, jak se postupem času mění prožívání - zatímco tehdy mnou nejvíc rezonoval Obyčejný život, tentokrát ve mně ponejvíce tlouklo právě srdce Hordubalovo.

This is a thought-provoking trilogy; each of the three stories provides a different angle on the same philosophical questions: 1) What is truth and can we ever know it? and similarly, 2) Can we ever know our fellow humans or ourselves? What is the measure of a person? The people in Capek's stories are prisoners of their own mental paradigms--their reality is merely a reflection of who they themselves are.

In the first story, Hordubal's death and the subsequent trial for those accused of his murder shows that Hordubal's version of his own life and the people in it stands in sharp contrast to that of his community. Hordubal sees his wife Polana as beautiful and faithful, a good wife (we all to some extent believe what we want to believe) whereas the other villagers see her as bony and unfaithful, and they see Hordubal as a cuckold. Even as we read about the events leading up to Hordubal's death, the reader is likely to side with the villagers' view of Polana, but we have a more nuanced view of Hordubal himself, since we are party to his thoughts. The reader finds himself, like the villagers, condemning Polana, who is difficult to like, even as we learn of many extenuating circumstances that could be used to cast reasonable doubt on the murder verdict. This story invites us to look at ourselves and our own judgment of the world. Do we see what is, or is our condemnation of others merely a reflection of our own lack of compassion? Especially interesting is the character of Stepan, who is intense and passionate, like the horses that he prizes, in sharp contrast to Hordubal's gentle nature which is similar to the cows to which he gravitates. In spite of these differences, it is Stepan who seems to have an epiphany during the trial, causing him to echo Hordubal's support of Polana. Stepan chooses to support Hodubal's version of reality out of respect and admiration for Hordubal himself. Sadly, he is the only one.

The second story looks at the same questions from another perspective. A man who has been badly injured in a plane accident and is thus unable to give an account. One by one, the people around the victim give their own version of who the victim was and how he came to be there, and we can see that their stories are more a reflection of themselves than the victim. This story was less compelling than Hordubal but it nonetheless invites the reader to ask, what is truth?

The third story, An Ordinary Life, tells the story of a man's life, which in the first telling is rather pleasant and conventional. However, the man himself then goes back over various statements that he made and challenges them: Did he love his wife or was it just a marriage of convenience? Was his career as a station-master just a way of controlling his world? Was he truly humble and unassuming or was he wildly competitive? Was he a conventional person or a sexual deviant? Etc. Ultimately, the message is that this one person is a composite of many different characters, and just as we cannot judge others or know them fully (the lesson of Hordubal) neither can we fully know or judge ourselves.

This was a hard one to rate.
Three novels in one. The first, Hordubal, is the best of the three by far. A wonderful, almost absurd tale of a man who comes back home after years and can't tell his wife is having an affair. As a twist, it ends as a sort of detective story. This novel is the perfect example of why I like to seek out books native to the country I am visiting. It has a bit of history and gives a view on Czech culture of the time and region the novel is set in.

The 2nd story is the sketch of a man who's in hospital and in a coma. A nurse, poet and a clairvoyant all give a supposed history of the man based on absolutely nothing.

The last story starts off all right, but near the end dissolves in philosophizing about personalities which left me struggling to finish the novel.

Perhaps I went into the 2nd and 3rd novel in the wrong frame of mind, but I don't think so. If Hordubal hadn't been there, this collection would have got a maximum of 2 stars, mainly due to An Ordinary Life, but Hordubal was so lovely, on its own I would have rated it at least 4 stars.

Three separate novels by Čapek (most impressive for me was "Hordubal") that are bril example that psychological literature can tell us something deep and interesting about a human. That it doesn't have to be like all contemporary American psychological literature in which "All the bad things that happen to me and all the evil I do are caused by my parents".

(četla jsem jenom Hordubala)