Season’s End at the Úštěk Lido

Twelve stories about low-ranking heroes, with extras in the main roles

Passion in a pub’s private room degenerates into a seething mass of characters. A conversation about “love that lasted” ends with a report from bed battlegrounds. A car breaks down, a life is turned upside down, someone searches in vain for a place to rest. Long after dark, the Eden Park Hotel has its “CLOSED” sign up.

An author whose previous fiction is justly praised by critics and readers has returned with an extraordinary collection of short stories that impresses by its readability, credible characterization and precise style. It will not escape the attentive reader that the stories are subtly connected by small recurring motifs. The occasional sense that time is cyclical and characters unseen or merely glimpsed have big roles to play, is something we all recognize. Are we the heroes of our lives or just extras in them?  

A season is ending; doors are slowly closing. Is that all there is? Then suddenly, without warning, “a golden arrow of awareness pierces our sullen fatigue: this is happiness after all”.   

The author says about her book: ”The idea for a collection of twelve stories grew out of memories of a book called The Czech Year in Fairy Tales, Songs, Games and Dances, Rhymes and Riddles, which I loved to read as a child. Some parts are taken from the area of northern Bohemia, where we had a cottage; others I have deliberately set elsewhere. Among other things, this book is about counting down to a season’s end: the old world is going down, the new will not be the same…”

”These stories are powerful, sad, touching and funny. They show kindness by their keen understanding of everyday lives, portrayed in brilliant detail. Far from being the work of a dispassionate observer, they demonstrate an outlook on life with spiritual overtones, albeit one unheroically problematized.”
Vilma Kadlečková, writer