Petrolejové lampy – Havlíček Jaroslav (2016)

Kerosene Lamps is a psychological drama of an unyielding woman set against the chronicle of human fates in a transformative time, whose events far exceed the dimensions of the small town in which the novel takes place. The story is dominated by masterfully captured, ambiguous, internally contradictory, and therefore genuinely lively characters, whose traits are sharpened in extreme situations from which there is no escape. The main heroine, Štěpka, a robust amazon endowed with predatory energy, has been accustomed to misunderstanding since childhood, but also to admiration. She rebels against the absurdity of fate, and her life is perpetually driven by the tension between the desired ideal and the real circumstances. She can control the course of events with her strong hands, but this does not hold true in matters of love, and thus she gains and loses in a strange marriage that inevitably heads toward a bizarre end. Is irony Štěpka's only way out as the sole honorable compromise between a deeply wounded soul and a world that cannot be reconciled with (Stendhal), or will her persistent belief that "what is not, can be" come true? The romantic realist Jaroslav Havlíček, an outstanding observer and author with an extraordinarily unique, inimitable vision of the world, created in this novel a fascinating image of the general transformation from the turn of the century, which continues into our...