In her new novel, The Closeness, Daniela Hodrová convinces us, not for the first time, that nothing ends - not life, not love, not writing, not even the story she began forty years ago with Podobojí and which, after Kuklá and Théta, continued with Comedy, Evocation and Twisted Sentences, the book of 2016. The title, That Proximity with the Demonstrative Pronoun, suggests the concreteness of this feeling in relation to the world and to the fate of people, magnificent not only in times of suffering but also in everyday struggles. The unconcealed autobiographical narrative, progressing forward and backward in time and alternately rendered in first and third person, organically incorporates events from the lives of people near and far, as well as tense scenes from the lives of historical figures - priests, nuns, writers, philosophers, the Reich Protector, an actor and others. All of these stories (some of which the author has told several times before, but in different contexts and with new details) are lived and depicted in the spirit of "that closeness," and in the novel a single Story emerges from them, at once intimate and historical. We can observe how the narrative becomes more personal from novel to novel, and with it moves away from "spiral sentences" towards a simpler structure and greater stylistic simplicity.
Czech edition