Bereme, co je – Nosková Věra (2021)

Pavla, the heroine of the generational novel 'We Take What Is', was born after World War II. Her grandparents, brickmakers from the suburbs of Vienna, accepted President Beneš's call to foreign Czechs and returned to their homeland. She was conceived by a nineteen-year-old Viennese girl and a similarly young Slovak, while her father had to enlist in the army and behaved like any immature young man who didn't bother with contraception. The young mother divorced and remarried, this time to a typical good guy. In her adolescence, much to her mother's dismay, Pavla mirrors the appearance and nature of her rejected progenitor. After graduating from high school, instead of further studies, she faces factory work. She runs away from home to escape the manifestations of psychopathic hysteria and a boorish kitchen matriarchy, finding refuge among oddballs and the city's outcast figures. A dramatic relationship with a bohemian and a drunkard ends with her hospitalization in a psychiatric facility. Finally, she travels to her father's region, experiences the joy of acceptance and the intoxication of the Slovak Paradise landscape, but her longing for Prague forces her to leave. The story of a vital and sensitive heroine, who leans towards joy and full-bodied experiences, unfolds in the former Strakonice, amidst the atmosphere of small-town and regime surveillance and scrutiny. The novel 'We Take What Is' was nominated for a literary award...