ABSTRACT
In recent times, poets and prose writers from Jean Follain and Henri Calet to Gil Jouanard, Pierre Autin-Grenier, Marcel Cohen, and Jacques Réda have likewise scrutinized le quotidien. Their touching, witty, wacky, sarcastic, or scrupulously reporter-like descriptions of common objects, urban banalities or rural humdrumness provide rare insights into the human condition, even into the search for spiritual truths. This vital literary tradition has now culminated in Notions de base, an absorbing collection of short prose texts penned, not by a Frenchman, but rather by Petr Král, a Czech poet who emigrated to Paris in 1968 and has been writing in French since the early 1980s. Král's succinct texts are persuasive; they haunt the mind, thereafter influencing our perceptions, not only of hats, but also of stairways, canes, voices, balconies, kitchen knives "that really cut," the colors green and blue, and much more.
