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The Sleepwalkers’ Ball

The Sleepwalkers’ Ball is intended as a kind of literary homage to silent film comedy. The cartoon-like or grotesque characters, the dreamlike apparitions and sudden shifts in time and space, the way in which it occupied a strange sort of space between comedy and terror – all these reference the world of silent film. Psychoanalytic readings of comedy as a kind of anxiety dream also led me to research the realms of surrealism and absurdity, particularly in their East or Central European manifestations, and the black and white cityscape of the novel draws on Czech poetism and the Kafkaesque tradition of uncertain realities. Studies of the Czech and Polish filmic traditions, and the role of the sixties ‘New Wave’ in both literature and film are thus central to the formal experimentation of the book, as are my studies of Gogol, Hrabal and Skvorecky.