Among the Ruins

More about the book

Balla creates a beautiful, thought-provoking, often funny portrait of human frailty. Consisting of fragments newspaper reports, TV news items, conversations, letters, voice messages and police reports related to a fragile middle-aged woman, Vargová, and her drug and alcohol dependent therapist, Dr Feleslegi. It is not clear that either of them have actually met but Vargová is fixated by Feleslegi as her therapist and sends him many messages detailing her life and thoughts covering loneliness, bullying by her father and husband and her delusion that she is still living in the former communist state of Czechoslovakia.