Markéta Pilátová: Czechs in the Jungle

While the Communists were building a dictatorship in the Czech lands, in the Brazilian jungle Jan Antonín Baťa was building new Zlíns. Markéta Pilátová’s novel S Baťou v džungli (In the Jungle with Baťa) recounts the little-known stories of Czech émigrés in South America. The narrator is Jan Antonín Baťa himself, who returns from the grave in order to tell his own story as it actually was, not as it was painted by Communist propaganda and historians. He doesn’t just recall his closest collaborators and advisors, such as Hugo Vavrečka, but even attends the funeral of Václav Havel. The ghost of Jan Antonín Baťa writes poetry and is unwilling to leave this world until he has found justice.