It is a cruel book (
The Last Thing) and if any novellas in Slovak literature have earned the title "cruel tales" then these fourteen tales of Lahola have earned it. Yet they are only more than cruel in the Villierse sense of the word. If I could compare them to something I would compare them to fourteen circles of "a modern hell" - and I wouldn't do this to prove or point out of mere wilfulness because the word "hell" appears a number of times and it isn't by chance that the author called one of his last dramas Inferno - Hell. And what sort of hell is it? Definitely not Dante's hell. In this hellish universe there are no ghostly, gothic devils, symmetrical circles and there are not even sinners. On the contrary, Lahola's hell differs from the hell, which we have encountered in ancient religious images. It is a place where the innocent suffer or the guilty only in proportion: all of us are guilty. Yet Lahola's hell is close to the Dantesque Inferno; not through its external appearance but through its own inner meaning. It truly is a place ruled by Evil, of course, Evil understood not in a religious-metaphysical design but a design individually and uniquely of the earth.
Jozef Felix
