This Room Is Impossible to Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood, Parthian Books, 2025
When Nicol Hochholczerová’s novella This Room is Impossible to Eat was first published in her native Slovakia in 2022, it caused a cultural and political storm, generating both praise and scorn for its intimate but ambiguous semi-autobiographical narrative that describes the grooming and subsequent relationship between a teenage student and her art teacher. The praise came from readers, literary critics, and jurors of literary prizes; the initial scorn came from parents worried about the impact of the book’s inclusion on the reading lists of selected Slovak high schools. Their concerns were then picked up by ever-vigilant, always campaigning politicians seeking to originate new fronts in the online Slovak culture wars. A new narrative was created for the novel, which was then ‘amplified’ (or more accurately, manipulated) into a furious national debate that almost destroyed the credibility of one of Slovakia’s literary awards, the René Prize. With the benefit of hindsight, this response can be seen as an application of divisive tropes, mirroring the social media manipulation practised by Slovakia’s eastern neighbours and offering a portent to the future direction of Slovak politics.
Regardless of the surrounding furore, the newly published English text—beautifully translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood—introduces a compelling, engaging, and forceful masterpiece of minimalism. The narrative is set out in linear but short chapters that identify the teacher and the student in a compelling, asymmetric conversation between inner dialogues, then quickly becomes a compact and sometimes austere statement of facts and emotions as both protagonists grow older. Their entanglement ‘begins,’ ‘matures,’ and then ‘ends’—though how it ends is best left for the reader to decide.
The book begins with the teacher at the age of fifty. In his own manipulative mind, he is ‘comforting’ his own teenage daughter, who’s distraught at the death of Freddie Mercury:
He was glad that someone had died as it gave him the chance to be a good dad, he also felt glad at her mother’s funeral as he could hold his only daughter in his arms, glad that she had come home for a few days at least. . .
Thus, in a few short phrases, the reader is inducted into the teacher’s psyche, which at once suggests a history of abuse, the damage it has caused, and a delusional sense of self. His student’s narrative, by contrast, is full of adolescent fuming and occasional dark humour. As the novel begins, Tereza is twelve and has embraced her inner goth: ‘All my clothes are black, I’m my parents’ mini-funeral.’ Tereza’s parents argue a lot, and it isn’t clear whether they notice her frequent absences or if they check her alibis. There are also hints of bulimia and oblique references to her teacher. Aged fourteen, she writes: ‘You tie my hands with the chain from my trousers. We’re my parents’ mini-funeral.’
Through it all, Hochholczerová never actually describes the physical relationship in any detail. Instead, she creates an enthralling and curious sense of the banal in the sheer atypicality of the narrative and the perceived reality of its unfolding within a small community. This and the publication’s resultant cause célèbre raised many questions about how various experiences can—or should—be portrayed in Slovak literary fiction. In her review, fellow Slovak writer Ivana Gibová discussed the author’s progressive approach to both the issue of consent and the role of parents; in her view, This Room Is Impossible to Eat undermines the usual assessment of predatory sexual grooming in literature and in reality, wherein the parents or ‘the environment’ would ‘normally’ intervene and expose predatory behaviour. In her view, the stark literary success of the novella exposes the fact that nothing ‘normal’ happens in it.
An exposure of sexual abuse and ‘normality’ was also the topic of two other fiction titles published in the Czech Republic in 2021: Vanessa Springora’s Svolení (Consent, translated from the French Le consentement) and Hana Lehečková’s Poupátka (Bud). In Slovakia, the combined reactions to all three books turned into a fierce battle on social media. Memes and narratives normalising the sexual exploitation of young women overwhelmed the feeds, suggesting that young women were responsible for their own abuse and sharing other victim-shaming tropes. Hochholczerová herself was repeatedly attacked for writing about abuse and accused of generating the storm herself to create publicity. These online attacks made for difficult reading and suggested darker, more organised motives—way beyond any expected media narrative—that disturbed the tenor of Slovakia’s public space. However, this destructive anti-art campaign was not picked up and reported by English-language media; outside Slovakia, it was though it has never happened.
This disturbed sense of reality and the consequential hate campaign set the tone for one of the most furiously contested European election in recent memory: the 2024 Slovak presidential election. To English-language readers, there was a lot going on elsewhere—conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, bitterly fought elections in Romania and Georgia—and these ongoing stories drowned out any international mention of Slovakia’s election cycle, which saw Peter Pellegrini take the presidency. However, after the results were announced, one Slovak event did make the international news for about ten seconds; Robert Fico, the nation’s prime minister and close ally to Pellegrini, visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow in January 2025. Given the daily outrages elsewhere, most global readers would struggle to remember Fico’s name or the fact that the last time he was in power, a young journalist and his girlfriend were murdered for exposing his party’s mafia links.
Fico, Pellegrini, and their ‘nationalist’ partners won the 2024 elections by weaponising the corruption-hating, lockdown-weary, and anti-intellectual sentiments of the Slovak population, while also reminding the electorate of the incumbent governing coalition’s sheer uselessness. Similar issues of memory, identity, and corruption currently dominate politics and culture throughout central Europe, but the lack of global media interest represents an enduring marginalisation, defining this region as the very edge of European thought or thoughts: a very definite nowhere.
In his 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope coined a term for the occidental regions beyond western Europe: Ruritania. One of the many beautiful and compelling ambiguities of Ruritania is that no one really knows where it starts or where it ends, but the term remains representative of a region or nation that is difficult to describe and particularly troubled with internal attempts to redefine memory and identity. The complexity and numerous political paradoxes in Ruritania are thus overwhelming and encourage ignorance, particularly in western Europe and North America. However, such complexities can be reduced to the awesome banalities revealed inside the pages of This Room is Impossible to Eat. Towards the end of the book, in a line dripping with geopolitical foreboding, Tereza thinks: ‘I will turn your face to the east so that the sun shines in my eyes whenever I want to see you.’ East is Russia. East is an elsewhere so powerful that it blinds the eyes and blocks out facts. Tereza is lying in bed, inside this ‘nowhere’, and her abuser/lover isn’t listening. The following paragraph then only has one line, in italics:
What was that you were saying, sweetheart?
It is not too difficult to read this novella—and the social tumult it created—as an allegory of the Anglosphere’s relationship with the real-life nations that represent Ruritania, or Slovakia’s relationship with itself and its neighbours—particularly Russia. When urgent contemporary issues play out on a small stage, do they somehow matter less? When one considers that notions of consent and sexuality in fiction have been hotly discussed around the world, in addition to the recent trend of cultural dispute veering into political power-grabs, it is telling that recent events inside Slovakia have been overarchingly ignored by those outside the country.
Geopolitically, Slovakia can be seen as the very essence of nowhere, which is the very definition of Ruritania; even its own diplomats bitterly describe their country as ‘irrelevant’. Amidst this sense of frailty and invisibility, Hochholczerová’s novel powerfully brings in a new narrative to ‘nowhere,’ portraiting those who live within these isolated places, who read about the ‘somewheres’ of more dominant countries beyond their own reality. An intriguing parallel can be drawn here between the power dynamics in an abusive relationship and the global relations of a nation constantly belittled and disempowered by its more powerful neighbours.
This Room is Impossible to Eat is a brave, funny, and wise attempt to describe a complicated relationship between damaged human beings in a world too busy to notice or care, representing the emergence of a genre that perhaps can be called Ruritanian Realism: novels that portray the unknown, uncared for, and half-remembered fringes of Europe, and the vivid, necessary stories that they still have to tell.
Michael Tate is the founder of Jantar Publishing, a London-based publisher of European Fiction and Poetry. He is a graduate of the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and has also studied at Univerzita Karlova in Prague.
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