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Memorable, haunting characters in memorable, haunting locales fill the pages of Jarda Cervenka’s award-winning collection of stories. Cervenka takes us from Choco, the remotest jungle region of Colombia, to the infamous site of the Golden Triangle in Thailand, stopping along the way in Prague’s Lesser Town, the island of Gore off the coast of Dakar, a village bar in Kamikawa, heaven, and Minneapolis.
These stories are populated with well-meaning characters like Jindra, who disappears up the river in Papua New Guinea, towards "bad rapids and hostile folks who stick to some of the old, unpleasant dietary traditions," and the Bavarian professor who enjoys an idyllic, academic life, yet yearns to "disappear to some malarian hole at the edge of a jungle, with sauna-like heat and humidity, about as healthy as a hospital sewer, under a leaden sky that pours five meters of water per year on the palm-fronded roofs of some sorry shack sticking out of a permanent mudpie." Cervenka’s characters are imperfect specimens of humanity, politically and otherwise incorrect, and his effortless revelation of their kindness leaves the reader cautiously optimistic and fully entertained.
The Revenge of Underwater Man speaks to the optimist and adventurer in us all. This collection is edgy, erudite, irreverent, and funny—a rewarding read for those who treasure the true and the exceptional.
“In these magical tales, Jarda Cervenka moves with remarkable authority over the surface of the globe, from post-Cold War Prague to a remote Inuit village in Canada, from the dim light of a Japanese monastery to a Brussels brothel, and to ever more exotic realms—including memory itself, that most mysterious kingdom. This is the book of an adventurer, and the voice of these wry knowing stories remains as arresting as the keen eye taking in the wide world of oddity and appetite that binds them together. The stories here are lyric and tough-minded, and everywhere display the best quality of fiction, each story unfolding almost off-handedly, but finally, with captivating inevitability.” —Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education
Jarda Cervenka is Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Minnesota and author of Mal D’Afrique (1994).