"To forget is often
harder than remembering."
"Memory flattens everything."
It erases all but the most intense memory. The weakest, the happiest, you have to work hard to find them, to pull them up from the bottom, muddy and full of algae.
But why bring them to the surface now?
Why relive what is hidden in memory?
"Why do you keep digging it up?" your mother asks you, and instead of answering, you open your mouth again and try to name it, to dig up one fragment after another, to fit them into words, into images, and maybe in this way you can prevent something similar from happening to someone else."
What happens when abuse is passed down from generation to generation? How heavy is the price of being "different"? In his autobiographical debut, Marek Torchik does not round off or settle for answers, reaching the knife to the bone of memory, where reality and consciousness are intertwined with a fluid ending and dangerous consequences.
THE CREATOR
THE Marek Torčík (1993) is a poet, writer and journalist. He is originally from the town of Přerov and lives in Prague, where he studied English-speaking literature and culture at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University. In 2016, his poetry collection Rhizomy was published, and since then he has mainly published prose and poems in literary magazines. In 2018 and 2020 he was among the ten finalists of the Czech-Slovak poetry competition Básne SK/CZ. Rozložíš pamě is his first novel.
