“Communism tended to be an expression of sadomasochism in its infantile stage.”

Patrik Ouředník was born in Prague in 1957, but emigrated to Paris in 1984. His experience offers an antidote to provincial thinking.

“Why does one emigrate? There was the feeling of weariness, of intellectual suffocation. The absence of otherness is the principle per se of totalitarian regimes.”

In France, he served as an editor of L’Autre Europe and was instrumental in founding the Free University of Nouallaguet. As a noted translator, he has brought Bohumil Hrabal, Vladimír Holan, Miroslav Holub and Jiří Gruša into French, as well as François Rabelais, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and Claude Simon into Czech.

The outstanding novelist of his generation, Ouředník is quick to mesmerize:

“Internet users represented a new type of citizen, called a hypercitizen. The hypercitzen was the first supranational and totally free citizen in history and anyone could become one if they managed to stop thinking the old way, because in the coming world order, labor and capital and raw materials would no longer play any role.”

Ouředník’s work includes: Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Case Closed, and The Opportune Moment.

Patrik Ouředník lives in Paris.

Author's Website