Ruritanian Realism: A Review of This Room is Impossible to Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová

August 6, 2025 | in Uncategorized | by Michael Tate

[Hochholczerová] creates an enthralling and curious sense of the banal in the sheer atypicality of the narrative. . .

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. READ MORE…

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 16, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Julia Sherwood, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Slovakia, Belgium, and Puerto Rico!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a controversial book prize winner in Slovakia, a comic strip festival in Belgium, and a moving performance of a collection of short stories centered on gay life in Puerto Rico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Slovakia

Throughout June, ten writers longlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, presented their works online, at events in the capital, Bratislava, and the open-air summer festival Pohoda held at Trenčín airfield. However, much attention was paid to a major controversy surrounding one of the nominated books, Nicol Hochholczerová’s remarkable debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Can’t be Eaten Up), which depicts the relationship between a 12-year-old schoolgirl and her teacher, a man in his fifties. While there is universal agreement on the book‘s literary merits—it is among the five works on the award’s shortlist, announced on 7 September—the decision to also nominate it for the René Prize—a competition in which students of selected secondary schools choose a winner from five books—raised concerns that neither the 18-year-old students nor their teachers are equipped to handle sensitive subject without specialist psychological support. Fearing the withdrawal of funding or even lawsuits by incensed parents, the jury decided to withdraw Hochholczerová’s book from the competition, offering instead to send the book to the schools on request. While the resulting turmoil was great for sales, it has caused a rift in the literary community, put the talented young writer under a huge amount of stress, and aroused some fear that it has sounded the death knell of the René Prize.

After two years of Covid-related disruptions, the Authors’ Reading Month (ARM), Europe’s largest literary festival, organized by the Brno-based publishing house Větrné mlýny in partnership with Slovakia’s Literárny klub, returned this summer. It was hosted by venues in five cities of the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Lviv, which has hosted the festival in the past, was not on this year’s itinerary because of the war in Ukraine). With Icelandic literature as the focus of the twenty-third edition, some of the best-known Czech and Slovak writers were paired with thirty-one authors from Iceland, including Hallgrímur Helgason, Bragi Ólafsson, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson, as well as Sjón, who also attended the Slovak premiere of The Northman, the American epic action thriller based on Viking myths whose script he co-wrote with the director Robert Eggers.

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 22, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Julia Sherwood

Longlists and talks in Slovakia and Mexico

This week, our editors-at-large report on paper shortages, literature prize longlists, and efforts to deconstruct the writing workshop. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

Over the past year, Slovakia has not escaped the paper shortages that have affected the publishing industry all over the world, increasing printing costs and extending production times which, in turn, led to fewer titles being published. All this is likely to push up the price of books, in some cases by as much as 10-20 per cent, making Slovak readers, who already tend to spend less on books than their counterparts in many other European countries, even more reluctant to buy new works of literature, particularly by Slovak authors.

On 9 March, the longlist of Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, was announced. The eclectic mix of nominations includes new works by four previous winners, two of them past Asymptote contributors: Šesť cudzincov (Six Foreigners, excerpt here) by Marek Vadas, and Balla’s ‘polyphonic novel’ Medzi ruinami (Amidst the Ruins), as well as Stanislav Rakús’s Ľútostivosť (Mournfulness) and Ivan Medeši’s Vilkovia (Two Vilkos). The longlist features two other previous Anasoft Litera nominees: Ivana Dobrakovová for her latest novel Pod slnkom Turína (Under the Sun of Turin) and Vanda Rozenbergová with Zjedla som Lautreca (I’ve Eaten Lautrec), and two further women writers, Ivana Micenková with Krv je len voda (Blood Is Only Water) and Nicol Hochholczerová with her taboo-breaking debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Is Inedible). Another debut, Lukáš Onderčanin’s Utópia v Leninovej záhrade: Československá komúna Interhelpo (Utopia in Lenin’s Garden: The Czechoslovak Commune Interhelpo), is the first book of literary reportage to make it onto the longlist, while Arpád Soltész’s thriller Zlodej (The Thief) is the second genre novel in the prize’s history deemed worthy of inclusion among the top ten titles.

On 17 March the town council of Kremnica, a medieval gold-mining town and site of the world’s oldest still-working mint, unanimously approved an application to set up the first European Translators’ House in Slovakia. Named Zechenter House after the doctor, travel writer, and journalist Gustáv Kazimír Zechenter Laskomerský (1824-1908), it is expected to open its doors in two year’s time. The organisations behind the initiative are SOS Kremnica, a local NGO for the preservation of the town’s crumbling architectural heritage, and Mona Sentimental, run by translators Renáta Deáková and past Asymptote contributors Eva Andrejčáková and Gabriela Magová.