The Drowning of a Goldfish
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- 49,00 kr
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- 49,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
The narrator is a spunky young woman striving to escape from the social customs and cultural restraints that have spanned three political regimes: in a privileged childhood spent in the Czechoslovakian countryside prior to World War II, as a schoolgirl during the Nazi occupation, and as an adolescent and young adult witnessing the diminishing promise of communist rule.
“Lovingly conveys fleeting moments of a small child’s world in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, and later on the drab world of Stalinist Eastern Europe.” —Los Angeles Times
Lidmila Sovakova was born in Prague, where she lived until emigrating, in 1970, to England and then Germany—eventually settling in Paris in 1982. Multilingual, Lidmila received MA’s in Russian, Czech, and French at Charles University in Prague, a diploma of English language and literature from the University of Cambridge, England, and doctorat d’etat in French literature in France. She is the author of ten novels in addition to The Drowning of a Goldfish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This charming first novel casts a bittersweet look at the troubled post-WW II years in the author's native Czechoslovakia. The narrator is a sensitive young woman whose cosseted early life includes gardening with her grandfather and enjoying a high school education at a finishing school for the well-to-do bourgeoisie. But after the Communists seize power in 1948, her father, a successful banker, is imprisoned; at this point the story, which has been deliberately unfocused, springs to life. The narrator, barred from university because of her higher-class background, gets a job at a chemical goods warehouse. She eventually collapses and ends up in the hospital, where she meets her future husband, an opportunistic and boorish medical intern. The narrator's real education begins as she gets a job teaching Russian to factory and office workers, struggles to keep her marriage intact and schemes to fulfill her almost obsessive ambition: to receive a university degree and, like so many real-life members of the Czech intelligentsia of that period, be allowed to participate in society.
