in a World of Self-Understanding Weekdays
A strange book about the familiar world — seen from an angle that makes it look almost unrecognisable.
Illegal Dog in a World of Self-Understanding Weekdays is a work of grotesque, surreal fiction built around a deceptively ordinary setting: a place called Graveyard, populated by people whose habits, conversations and private fantasies seem to run on endlessly repeating loops.
At its centre is Fanatic, an uneasy observer moving through a world of eccentric characters, absurd encounters and unsettling everyday rituals. Around him, the book assembles a shifting cast — from the argumentative Train Driver and the inward-looking Tourist to the strange figures who inhabit the edges of the city. Their stories are interrupted by Quantitative Harvest, a surreal narrative within the narrative, with its own invented landscapes, rituals and unsettling logic.
This is not a conventional plot-driven novel, nor a guide to self-understanding. It moves by association, digression, repetition and sudden changes of register. Satire, black humour, philosophical observation, dream logic and deliberately excessive language collide. The grotesque is often funny; the funny can become uncomfortable; and beneath the absurdity runs a persistent attention to alienation, identity, memory, nostalgia, social conformity and the difficulty of feeling fully present in one's own life.
The book is intentionally demanding in places. It can be abrasive, meandering and disorienting. It does not offer a tidy conclusion or tell the reader what to think. Instead, it keeps returning to a question: how much of what we call ordinary life is genuinely ours, and how much is simply a pattern we have learned to inhabit?
All three editions are shared here completely free of charge. No payment, registration or subscription is required. Open the PDF in your browser to read it, or use the download link beneath each button to save a copy to your device.
Slovenská verzia knihy. PDF na čítanie v prehliadači alebo uloženie do zariadenia.
English edition in PDF format. Open it online or save the complete file.
English EPUB edition, suitable for Kindle and other e-readers. Download the file and send it to your reading device.
These files are offered for personal reading at no cost. The text remains the work of its author; free access does not transfer copyright.
Familiar places and social behaviours are reframed until their hidden absurdities become difficult to ignore.
Characters are less conventional heroes than distorted mirrors: contradictory, comic, repellent, lonely and recognisably human.
The recurring “Quantitative Harvest” passages open a second, stranger fictional world, where invented customs and dreamlike events interrupt the main narrative.
The prose can be vulgar, repetitive and deliberately overwhelming. Readers looking for a neat moral or a conventional arc may not find one here.
For more about Michal Kodnár, his writing, current interests and other projects, visit his personal website. For enquiries or collaboration, you can get in touch there too.