Patrik Ourednik - The Opportune Moment, 1855

The Opportune Moment, 1855 is another uproarious and unsettling attack on convention by one of literature’s great provocateurs. The nineteenth-century founding of “free settlements” in the Americas serves as a starting point for the new novel by popular Czech author Patrik Ourednik. At once satirical and philosophical, the book opens with an Italian anarchist’s letter to his noble former mistress, an impassioned rejection of all of Europe’s latest and greatest advancements, from the Enlightenment to social reform to communist revolution. We then leap back in time half a century to the alternately somber and hilarious shipboard diary of a common Italian everyman sailing to Brazil with a motley, multina­tional band of idealists to build a new society, a pitiless portrait of the often unbridgeable gap between theory and practice.