"Bizarre, intense and passionate, In the Name Of The Father reads beautifully, in spite of the bleak, banal and lonely life of the protagonist, and we’re told, the real life of the author, Balla. Sometimes he’s even funny. He’s always enlightening because, at the very heart of this story, is the search for the meaning of life. Yes, that old chestnut! But in this case try to imagine Kafka, Beckett, Bukowski and Borges sitting down together over beer, bread and Eisbein then you get the flavour of Balla’s rather earthy, existential quest." Rosie Goldsmith on eurolitnetworok.com
"Though Balla, one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary novelists, has been compared to Kafka, he might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret (Israeli author of The Nimrod Flipout and multiple other collections of surreal short stories), given the thoroughly ironic, often absurdly amusing, take on contemporary life that characterises his work." Andreea Scridon, The London Magazine
"It is in this search for meaning, hopeless though it may be, that Balla evokes the older, quasi-sacred role of the writer in society. However, his community is not that of traditional religion or the nation (Slovak, Hungarian, or otherwise), but one of outsiders, misfits, and lonely souls who are unable to identify with these or any other categories — a group, he suggests, that is much larger than we might think." Charles Sabatos, Los Angeles Review of Books
