In 1999, upon receiving the Open Society Prize, then-Czech Republic President Václav Havel gave a speech entitled The Last Laugh. “The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor,” he said. “An ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.” As a well-known dissident who served multiple prison terms, Havel had intimate knowledge of the need for comedic release in difficult times. This ethos can be seen in the literary work of writers like Milan Kundera and Ivan Klíma, and the films of Miloš Forman and Věra Chytilová; all found ways to satirically skirt their Communist oppressors. Now with the publication of Radka Denemarková’s A Contribution to the History of Joy – the first of the author’s four novels to appear in English – we can see how this legacy of spirited rebellion continues on in so-called “freer” times.
The topics that Denemarková is addressing aren’t remotely humorous: sexual assault, the exploitation of minors, the lingering trauma of war. And while it wouldn’t be accurate to say the novel is full of laughs, it has a decidedly tilted perspective that literalizes the distance of which Havel spoke. From the start, Denemarková adopts a bird’s-eye view that considers the human world “fiendishly simple.” Swallows, a species whose migratory patterns symbolize seasonality and resilience, are particularly prevalent. Because of the long distances they travel, they can also be seen as good omens, though it’s unlikely that any of Denemarková’s protagonists would consider themselves lucky.
The first we meet is identified simply as the Detective. He’s been called in to close the books on what appears to be a straightforward suicide case: a middle-aged businessman has been found hanged in his attic. His young Widow (capitalized in the text) insists that he wasn’t the type to take his own life and the Detective, acting on both a “tingling in his guts” and a burgeoning attraction to the Widow, initiates his own investigation. The businessman, he soon discovers, was accused of misconduct by several of his secretaries. He was also in the midst of writing a fictional account of his own life story.
The novel then jumps to a parallel narrative of three elderly women who live together in a house near Petřín Hill and have recently traveled to London. There’s Erika, a filmmaker; Diana, a yoga instructor; and Birgit, a creative writing teacher. They are clearly on some sort of case of their own, but its significance remains clouded. They follow a girl into a restaurant and steal the passport of the owner. Later, they lure this same girl to a yoga class and extract a confession from her: after suffering a brutal rape, she’s become ensnared in a human trafficking ring that’s run through the restaurant. She doesn’t seem to want their help, but they may force it on her anyway. Are these women protectors or predators? How much difference is there between the two, really?
Eventually, the two strands begin to intertwine: the Detective, following a tip that the businessman was once a student of Birgit’s, breaks into the Petřín house. In their attic he discovers a kind of archive: a vast trove of images, transcripts, and papers that meticulously document repeated crimes of sexual assault and abuse from World War II onward. “These bodies,” Denemarková writes, “have been trampled on by the tanks of one vast army, the global army of men.” Repulsed, the Detective flees from the house, but he can’t shake his growing suspicions that the women may be in league together, and are intent on carrying out a misandrist mission. But Denemarková has some tricks up her sleeve as she cinches these characters closer together, offering readers a metatextual mystery that unfolds a little like if Borges got lost in the files of Andrea Dworkin.
There are some other predecessors to whom Denemarková is indebted. The ways she’s riffing on crime fiction recall novels like Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, which also follow older female protagonists reckoning with histories of violence. But Denemarková’s off-kilter approach is steadfastly her own, couched as it is in the belief that “[l]anguage prevents us from articulating the truth, even when it doesn’t lie.” Readers hoping for definitive solutions will likely be frustrated by the swerves that the author takes, but for those willing to suspend their genre expectations, there are many rewards to be found here. Not every flight of imagination works, but there’s something refreshing about the novel’s looseness when so many other books can feel calculated in their approach to plot, risking little so as not to be too disagreeable to the masses. This is the sort of work that wants readers to sit with their discomfort.
Denemarková’s prose, poetically rendered by translators Julia and Peter Sherwood, depicts a society of citizens that are hopelessly alienated from their physical selves. Bodies, particularly those of women, move through spaces as if acted upon by them. The novel was first published in her native language in 2014; while lags in English translations aren’t uncommon, it is striking to read Contribution now in the wake of the #MeToo movement, when its impact and legacy have come into question. Though it brought down several notable predators, it’s also fair to say that public scrutiny of men’s bad behavior hasn’t improved it overall. Epstein’s clients have largely avoided consequences. Vulnerable groups must remain vigilant. That doesn’t make the novel dated; in fact, it only feels more urgent.
Which brings us back to Havel’s message of “see[ing] things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions.” If language can’t bring us any closer to the truth then what good is confession, for the victim or perpetrator? How do we account for our own complicity in the world’s horrors? What distance can we hope to achieve if our bodies continue to carry their burdens through generations? Certainly, Denemarková’s provocative novel suggests, we’ll never get as much perspective as the birds, who are descended from dinosaurs, after all, and have had centuries to make up their minds about us. Yet they keep returning, and we must, too. Such persistence is, perhaps, our own way of ensuring these stories aren’t lost to history.
FICTION
A Contribution to the History of Joy
By Radka Denemarková
Translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood
Coffee House Press
Published September 22, 2026
