L'istinto della fine. Apocalisse e sopravvivenza nella narrativa di Pavel Hak

In Pavel Hak’s books, humankind faces a horizon of extinction, threatened by environmental catastrophes, war technologies or simply by the violence that runs a fictional world halfway between novel and philosophical tale. Hak left Czechoslovakia in 1985 and experienced firsthand a biographical and linguistic uprooting in the age of globalization: settled in Paris, he published his first tale in French in 2001. In Sniper (2002) a lonely soldier, maybe a cyborg, works to exterminate the last humans in a world already infiltrated by robotic beings; in Warax (2009) FD21, last hero without a name, survived a global catastrophe and found himself in a wasteland. Nevertheless, in such a post-apocalyptic narrative universe, the human element – particularly refugees, violated woman, droves of immigrants - resists thanks of an irrepressible instinct to survive. A peculiar superposition of narrative plans allows the writer to tell stories set on both sides of apocalyptic border and forces the reader to wonder if the End is yet to come.