Chasing Blue

Chasing Blue is a novel about the prisons we build for ourselves and about looking for ways out of them. The narrative portrays the unusual and complicated relationship between the narrator and her neighbour, an older man named Molnár. Molnár, an uncompromising and unorthodox conceptual artist whose creativity had been curtailed under the previous regime but who has found himself similarly at odds with the brave new world of consumer capitalism, is also the narrator's former teacher. While being firmly rooted in the topography and history in Bratislava, Chasing Blue explores universal themes such as artistic, personal, and societal freedom, as well as issues such as aging, gender roles and motherhood, the centrality of the nuclear family, and our attachment to our home and the longing to escape from it.

Both main characters share a fascination with animals. The narrator and her daughter regularly visit the zoo where Molnár used to work, and the story is interspersed with entertaining descriptions of animal behaviour and the ways we relate to them: by keeping them as pets or caging them, by striving to understand them, by trying to find in them a reflection of our own selves, with some animals allowing us to get close to them, while others only permit us to watch them enviously from a distance. The lives and behavioural habits of animals allow the narrator to question our anthropocentric view on the natural environment and on human relationships and social structures that we often take for granted or consider immutable.

Colour is another key motif, particularly, as the title suggests, the colour blue. Kucbelová draws on the 19th-century hypothesis that the ancient Greeks were unable to perceive the colour blue, a theory based on the dearth of mentions of the hue in classical literature. The author uses this supposed deficiency as a metaphor for our inability to fully appreciate what surrounds us. Packed with poetic descriptions and surprising, unconventional humour, in Chasing Blue, Katarína Kucbelová stakes her claim as one of the most noteworthy writers working in Slovakia today.