Baradla Cave

The novel Baradla Cave has lost none of the force of its social critique and trenchant humor since it originally appeared in samizdat in the 1980s and officially published in 1995 by Edice Analogon. A living organism, Baradla is both place (Prague) and person (a woman), an exploration of maternity and femininity as well as a satirical look at the overweening mother-state and consumer society. The language collage comprising pseudo-scientific jargon, the diction of interwar magazines for women and girls, the demotic, and metaphoric stream is complemented by Jan Švankmajer's erotic collages, as scenes of episodic sexual violence alternate with humorous reflections on various ingrained habits and customs. With a seemingly boundless sense of the absurd, Švankmajerová fingers here practically everything having to do with modern existence: substance abuse, violent sex crimes, rampant consumerism, pervasive corruption, and dysfunctional family relationships.