BIZOM, or, Service and Mission
Rights sold:
GermanJiří Bizom, who’s just turned fifty years old, creates games – but neither board games nor computer games: his games are aimed at life, and you can play them in banal everyday situations. Bizom, the son of a Jew from Budapest, lives in present-day Prague, making his way as an employee in a grant foundation.
Bizom out of principle refuses to accept the pre-prepared codes and forced stereotypes which seemingly promise to clear up and enlighten your life. Consequently, he has no other option than to invent and play games – the stranger the better. People like Johan Huizinga, author of the book Homo ludens, or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who invented the concept of speech games, serve as an inspiration to him, as does a yellowed piece of typewritten paper he finds by pure chance in a museum park…
Bizom is one of the most remarkable prose works to have been written in Czech lately.
Sylva Fischerová does not stop surprising me. Her last book is prose narrated by a middle-aged guy – let’s call him a Prague intellectual who feels at home in a café as well as in a pub. I must confess: When reading the book, I was rather astonished, but at the same time I had a lot of fun. Sylva Fischerová depicts a “man’s world” with such precision and plasticity that – and I’m slightly exaggerating here – a man would not have been capable of it.
