This short collection of seven stories by a Czech writer asks for thoughtful attention and gives back plenty. The first four stories are written in first person, and can be seen as psedo-biographical accounts of possibly the same narrator, ordered by age. Thus in "My Conversations With Aunt Marie" she is a five-year-old girl in the 1950ies, spending the summer under the care of an aunt in the country, an old maid who's hopelessly lost in her memories of a wartime romance with a German soldier. The aunt gives the girl a secret German name and teaches her to pray for Werhmacht soldiers; the significance of all this is largely lost on the girl and thereby more strikingly powerful on the reader. In the next story, "A Letter For President Eisenhower" the same girl (or so I prefer to think) is now 10, and is asked by her school director to write a letter to the American president. She fervently packs it with Socialist propaganda cliches to a degree that seems ridiculous to adults around her.
The last two stories, set in India and ancient China, seemed more meandering and less cohesive than the others, though they also contained severally brilliantly described scenes.
At her best, Fischerova gives the reader complex and interesting characters, believable dialogue and wonderfully unforced narrative irony. Much of this is certainly helped by what seems to me a superb translation by Neil Bermel. Here's an excerpt from one of the stories that showcases the best of Fischerova's style. The narrator, in a train, watches a beautiful woman absorbed in applying lotion to her fingers, when she recognizes in her companion a man she's been seeing, non-romantically, almost every day. She realizes that the woman is the wife he never mentions:
"Suddenly the man next to her stood up; I had not noticed him before over the high divider between their seats. He stepped over her legs without a word, and because the tray further narrowed the already impassable gap between her and the seatback in front, he had to press his whole body against her. He did not look at her, nor she at him. She did not even symbolically move her legs aside to show that she wanted to make way for him, and he did not make the slightest effort to pass more considerately. There was no apology for entering each other’s bubbles. He overcame her like a geographical obstacle; she went on moisturizing her hands. They were from different universes where different laws applied. It looked terribly rude, even though nothing had happened. But there was a warning of sorts in that mutual disregard. It was a banal moment, but a defining one as well; there was a mute, lurking evil about it. The man worked his way through to the aisle and walked quickly toward the dining car. He did not notice me. It was Dr. M."
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