Original title: Pláňata
Genre: novel
Publisher:
Host, 2023
ISBN: 978-80-275-1761-9
Pages: 336
Foreign editions:
Macedonian (Muza, 2024, Igor Stanojoski)
Rights sold to:
Poland (Stara Szkoła)
Novel about coming of age at a time of revolution
An ordinary family in an ordinary village. Two girls of school age whose parents are in ordinary jobs. Grandparents too, in a rather too snug, patched-up, otherwise perfectly ordinary house. Around all this is ordinary, unchanging time. But these appearances are deceptive. It is 1989, and the old, communist regime of Czechoslovakia is moving silently towards sudden collapse. Pavlína, the main narrator of this multi-voiced narrative, shares her parents’ euphoric illusions of a different, better life, projecting them onto the white walls of her secret wishes and desires. These concern her relationships as well as ideas about freedom and its attractions. It occurs to the girl that her family – in which ‘everyone thinks well of everyone, more or less’ – is like a heath covered with a scrubby vegetation of misunderstanding, emotional hang-ups and, in some cases, aggression. The craving for whatever good fortune one can grab, and the temptation to exercise the power that flows from it, is an irresistible diversion from respect and empathy. It is as though a big black moth has landed on the inner and outer world. Pavlína is long out of school, yet so many stumbling blocks remain on her path to adulthood. Can a person change enough to leave their small world behind? Will its weight disappear along with the merciful darkness, or perhaps with the coming of a shining light?
"From an outsider’s view, in thematic terms this is perhaps the least striking of this highly successful author’s books. Yet it is one of her most impressive. Its principal “dramatic material” is life itself, along with its great changes – some imposed by fate, some reached painfully, by fumbling one’s way." — Martin Stöhr, editor
"I’m of the generation that the late Eighties/early Nineties caught on the cusp of puberty. It’s unlikely that such a time will come again. In Wild Cherry Trees, I explore how these years touch the life of an ordinary family, discovering how the protagonist Pavlína, her parents and others close to her sail off into the great unknown of the new time, and how they then handle their great expectations and the impact of being deprived of them. Above all, however, this book is about how no outside change can solve personal problems and demolish differences of opinion. While her family are drowning in their everyday, apparently mundane concerns, Pavlína strives for a way out." — Petra Dvořáková about her book
"Wild Cherry Trees is a powerful and in many ways emotive novel that works not only with the rather frankly described years under Communism, but also with the painful events taking place within one extended family, under one multi-generational roof and, moreover, from the point of view of perhaps all the protagonists involved in the ordinary and more challenging moments of everyday life.
(…)
With each successive novel, she shows that she still has something to say, that her well of ideas is not exhausted, and that her stories are still a very intense, if in many ways painful, experience that raises important family and social issues that are relevant to every age. In fact, the period setting of her novels is just the proverbial icing on the cake, which always highlights the whole situation and atmosphere, and often, as in the case of Wild Cherry Trees, only brings more hardship to the protagonists of her novels.
(…)
This story is superbly written and shows the author’s excellent literary talent and sense of language.
(…)
Petra Dvořáková doesn’t present anything outright, she doesn’t impose anything on her readers, she gives them the opportunity to work with her stories intuitively and individually, to find solutions to their own problems and to wonder whether some conflicts and misunderstandings are not just the result of something bigger that remains hidden and locked away somewhere in the darkness of the cellars."
Wendy Šimotová, Kulturně
"Dvořáková knows how to put her finger on a socially resonant topic, whether dysfunctional families and their endless power struggles, childhood traumas, the division of society based on socio-economic status or life on the periphery. She is able to credibly describe the “strange” family, which we might observe like an interesting creature in a fishbowl: one that does not particularly elicit our our own perceptions and certainties, because “things definitely aren’t as bad as that with us!”"
Alena Šidáková Fialová, Tvar
"In Wild Cherry Trees, Dvořáková also succeeds in what she does best: vividly depicting the characters and the environment in which they live, and letting the questions that the story raises resonate in the reader. That these questions are disturbing and weighty is obvious. For they touch the lives of all of us and seek to penetrate to the very core of many of the pains, difficulties and sorrows that have permeated the last few generations."
Hana Chrástová, Iliteratura.cz
