Fleeting Snow

Pavel Vilikovský's novella Fleeting Snow (Letmý sneh, 2014), depicts the gradual loss of memory of the narrator's wife. The narrator reminisces about his past life with his wife and muses on issues ranging from human nature and the soul, to names and the phonetics of Slovak and indigenous American Indian languages, in an informal, humorous style whose lightness of touch belies the seriousness of his themes.

The book's title refers to its recurring central motif, an avalanche whose inexorable descent cannot be stopped once the critical mass of snow has begun to roll, echoing the unstoppable process of memory loss. Five themes or storylines, intertwined in passages of varying lengths, are labelled with letters of the alphabet and numbers in a playful allusion to scholarly works and musical compositions.

About the Author
One of the most important Eastern European writers of the post-Communist era, Pavel Vilikovský began his career in 1965, but the political content of his writing and its straightforward treatment of such taboo topics as bisexuality kept him from publishing the works collected here until after the Velvet Revolution. In 1997 he won the Vilenica Award for Central European literature. Julia Sherwood is a freelance translator, mainly for salon.eu.sk. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.