Ceilings

Awarded the Magnesia Litera Prose Book of the Year in 2013, Ceilings is a polyphonic novel kin to the work of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn. Taking place in a mental hospital in Prague where the “narrator” is undergoing detox treatment for substance abuse, the borders blur between inner experience and the outer world, between reality and dream. As the walls and ceilings hemming in the desire for freedom fantastically break open as if into the unknown and gender fluidly shifts between brother and sister, who are one and the same, Brabcová’s flights of imagination portray how difficult it is to “come out of oneself” and to engage with the other in a multifarious world that demands it, no matter how ambivalently.