David Short

A whimsical and humorous adventure through the stars. Written in 1856, ten years before the publication of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, Krutohlav and his friends set off to explore the solar system in a motorized ‘dragon’ powered by gunpowder taking with them many kinds of sausage, cheeses, pickled cabbage and wine. A very whimsical and humorous account of how Krutohlav, a country gentleman from rural Central Europe explores the solar system. His first attempt to travel to the moon in a balloon ends in failure after crashlanding in the Egyptian desert. Instead of giving up, Krutohlav builds a new craft he calls a dragon and convinces a group of his friends to travel with him around the solar system.

Balla creates a beautiful, thought-provoking, often funny portrait of human frailty. Consisting of fragments newspaper reports, TV news items, conversations, letters, voice messages and police reports related to a fragile middle-aged woman, Vargová, and her drug and alcohol dependent therapist, Dr Feleslegi. It is not clear that either of them have actually met but Vargová is fixated by Feleslegi as her therapist and sends him many messages detailing her life and thoughts covering loneliness, bullying by her father and husband and her delusion that she is still living in the former communist state of Czechoslovakia.