Víme svý – Nosková Věra (2008)

What would have to happen for me not to be happy in such a landscape? Pavla asks herself as she returns to South Bohemia after a fiasco in Prague. The heroine of the novels Bereme, co je and Obsazeno finally finds interesting work, but it comes from the very people she has always despised. Hraničov and nearby Liňov live by guarding the border and spying on almost everyone. While her superiors want Pavla to cooperate, she dodges them and confuses them in the Tichovod manner. The landscape around the picturesque border town with its Border Guard garrison, an erotomaniac friend, and the men in work clothes who fill The Dead Man’s pub after their shifts are all powerful players in a story that remains uncertain almost to the end. The malice of those around her and the officials’ debased amusements contrast with the heroine’s longing for an upright life and spontaneous love. Pavla faces both the demand and the temptation to finally become normal, exchanging her nonconformity for respectable work and housing. She devises escapes, bluffs, and doubts her path. This novel is about a turning point in life, the search for a bearable compromise, the pleasures of body and soul in a lovely landscape, one failed and one hopeful love amid hostile surroundings, and life in the former Sudetenland at the beginning of the 1970s, a region once wounded and now settled by people from elsewhere. The contents are in Czech.