Where Was the Angel Going?

"Somewhere in the cosmos there are happier places," muses Martin Vrána, the hero of Jan Balabán’s novel Where was the Angel Going?. "People are transported to the planet Earth for punishment. Part of the punishment is their ignorance of the fact. We’ve forgotten that we’ve forgotten." Yet, as this very reflection implies, in Martin’s case, part of his "punishment" is his ever-present memory of an Eden from which he had been expelled. The prototypical outsider, a member of a minority community…— Google Books