Czech novel about Roma, Ukrainian and Vietnamese youth on the outskirts of society gives a voice to those who don't fit in anywhere
The heroes of the debut novel by Martin Kanaloš, Já, Tran a všechno ostatní [Me, Tran, and All the Rest] (KHER, 2025) know very well what it's like to have no place in Czech society. Unlike their classmates at the college prep school they attend in their small town, Dezider, who is half-Romani, and Tran, who is half-Vietnamese, don't go to parties because no one invites them - instead, they're stuck in a prefabricated housing project feeling like their lives are slipping through their fingers.
Together the friends look at the night sky, watch films, and ogle girls whom they can never hope to meet through their windows. They know how to make fun of themselves, but their uncelebrated existence makes them angry as well.
Dezider is one of the “angry young men” of world literature. He gets mad at everybody and everything, from his own origins to his divorced parents, superficial classmates, the political left and political right, football players, ice hockey players, alcohol drinkers, recreational drug users – but the material differences between his and Tran’s broken homes and those of the rest of the school are what irritate him most of all.
At the age of 17, Dezider is so unwaveringly convinced of his own truth that he cannot find any way to comprehend the difficult fate and occasional stumbles of his own parents. He has something of the primal revolt of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger), the hypersensitivity of Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky), and the uncompromising social criticism of the narrators in the books of Édouard Louis.
Dezider is armed not just with a sense of historical injustice, but also with cynicism, irony, and the language of the present generation – he sets out to defend his vision of the world, which sometimes comes back to haunt him like a boomerang. The novel is set in an unnamed small town and in the basic ideological clash between the ordinary housing estate where Dezider lives with his mother and Tran lives with his grandmother, and the affluent suburbs where their more fortunate classmates sunbathe by the swimming pools in the safety of their fenced-in gardens.
Everybody encounters each other at the local college preparatory school which, while it is selective, is also backward and ossified, a place where the faculty and students resent anybody who does not conform to their expectations. Dezider’s and Tran’s outsiderness is all the more complicated because they are rejected both by ethnic Czechs and by the minority communities to which they are related because, in the words of these heroes, they are “too black for the whites and too white for the blacks”.
The two friends spend their time fantasizing about girls whom they’ve only caught glimpses of, or gazing at the night sky, or playing computer games. “The story is based on the friendship of two adolescent boys from ethnic minorities on the outskirts of society. It’s the genre of young adult fiction and I adapted the language and scope of the book to that. I’d like young readers to enjoy reading it while also realizing they aren’t alone in their problems,” Kanaloš said.
(PHOTO: Barbora Votavová)
The boys’ spontaneous trip to a party in an upper-class neighborhood launches a series of events which may not actually move them up in the hierarchy of their alma mater, but which do create room for their individual maturations and aid them with establishing the foundations of a wider solidarity as outsiders. The third character to join them is Ruslana, a Ukrainian girl who also knows rejection and shunning from her position as an immigrant, but no longer wants to be everybody’s punching bag.
Not only does Ruslana inspire her friends, she is also quite beautiful and intelligent, and the young men cannot be indifferent to her charms. It is this understanding among these outsiders and the sensitive grasp of their feelings of isolation and lack of acceptance that make this prose effort by Kanaloš a work that resonates far beyond its target age group.
As the poet and literary commentator Jonáš Zbořil has noted: “Nothing awakens empathy better than literature. This novel from Kanaloš awakens our memories of the loneliness each of us has experienced. Then it heals them. Dezider and Tran become our best friends.“
The author is not just writing from the position of generation Z, though, but also from a place of cultural and social disunity. “This book is a critique of society that gets into one’s conscience and causes one to reflect on the individual and on one’s power to change one’s judgment of others,” Kanaloš said.
In the Czech Republic, literature by and about Roma is nothing new. However, authors such as Andrej Giňa or Elena Lacková were the only voices heard for quite some time, familiarizing their peers with the culture of Romani communities in Slovakia who live traditionally.
The next wave of Romani authors told stories about their postwar arrival in Bohemia and the relative affluence and safety of the normalization era (Gejza Horváth, Erika Olahová, Gejza Demeter, etc.). In recent years, thanks to the short story collection Samet blues [Velvet Blues] (KHER, 2021), the perspective has shifted toward reflections on the 1990s.
Forty-somethings such as Věra Horváthová-Duždová, Rena Horvátová, or Marie Siváková undermine the hitherto uncomplicated image of post-revolutionary euphoria and show that the Roma have become the neglected victims of the transformation. This trend culminated in Patrik Banga’s book Skutečná cesta ven [The Real Way Out] (Host, 2022), which won the Magnesia Litera award, depicting the neo-Nazi violence and police brutality of the first decade after the Velvet Revolution without pulling any punches.
Before now, however, nobody has spoken for Romani youth today, to say nothing of young Czechs who have the “bad luck” of living two national identities at once. In that sense, this debut from Martin Kanaloš is pioneering.
Martin Kanaloš (born 1997 in Sokolov) has dedicated himself to writing since his school days. His first short story, “Ty jsi jako já” [You’re Like Me] was published in Samet Blues: Drsná devadesátá v povídkách Romů [Velvet Blues: The wild ’90s in Romani short stories] (KHER, 2021).
Also in 2021, his short story “Stálo to za to” [It Was Worth It] was published in RESPEKT magazine’s winter literary supplement (51-52/2021). In 2025, “Ty jsi jako já” [You’re Like Me] was reprinted with illustrations by Marie Nakonečná in a publication from the Graphics and Illustration Studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design called Thursday’s Child.
Kanaloš has a bachelor’s in art history from Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in Prague and is currently completing his master’s in the History of Modern European Culture at Charles University’s Faculty of Humanities. He works at the National Pedagogical Institute as a coordinator of motivational talks for Romani pupils, and thanks to the Albatros Foundation he has completed a short study stay at Oxford.
Since 2025, Kanaloš has been a member of the Czech Government Council for Roma Minority Affairs. He currently works as an art historian.
Kanaloš lives in Prague. His book was published with financial support from Bader Philanthropies, Inc. and the Czech Culture Ministry.
