Ways of Writing about Love

In his most personal novel to date, Jan Němec turns his own five-year relationship into the core of the narrative, tracing its arc from first intimacy to final rupture. The book, which emerged from the need to understand what went wrong with him and his girlfriend, shows how the death of a relationship can spill over into the birth of a novel as a kind of self-preserving literary reincarnation. Autofictional in nature, Ways of Writing about Love is enriched by a range of narrative devices, including allusions to iconic works of prose and excerpts from letters and news reports. Intimate and subtly controversial, the novel fuses author, narrator, and central character into a single voice, breaking the conventions of narration and testing the limits of what prose can be.

An excerpt from the novel, translated by David Short, has been featured in Asymptote.

Published in 2019 by Host Publishers in the Czech Republic.
405 pages / 13,5 cm × 20,5 cm

Also by Jan Němec