Literary fiction, Prose

The author, who is associated with Czech experimentalism, has finally published a “traditional” novel, twenty years after her last work of prose. The themes remain the same: the fate of people from a totalitarian society, a view of a mature person of her life, lost home, the complex re-establishment of disrupted continuity. John and Mary Lazar live in Italy, but their life stories are connected with Czechoslovak history from their childhood in the fifties until the present, from the Brno postwar death march and the expulsion of the kulaks to the revealed collaborators of the communist secret police and efforts to return to their roots which cannot succeed. Sylvie Richterová (1945), a writer of fiction as well as a poet, essayist and literary theorist, has lived since 1971 in Italy where she is a professor of Czech language and literature at the University of Rome.