MORE THAN ONE LIFE
by Miroslava Holubová & translated by Alex Zucker & Lyn Coffin & Zdenka Brodská
MORE THAN ONE LIFE ($22.95; Jul.; 104 pp.; 0-8101-1705-3). This compact saga, the first of Holubov†’s novels to be translated into English, observes the unraveling of a middle-class Czechoslovakian family from the years immediately preceding the WWII through the 1968 Prague Spring uprising. The narrator is the family’s unnamed daughter, who records—in both an extended reminiscence and in excerpts from her “dream journal”—the gradual estrangement of her father, a successful and socially prominent businessman, from his wife’s hesitant gropings toward asserting her independent identity. The result is both a fascinating indirect characterization of a man out of step with the way his world is changing, and a potent little allegory of his country’s tortuous political evolution. A thoughtful and provocative fiction, executed with admirable concision and finesse.