Even in her fourth prose, Šafránková presents a more or less holiday reading, which, however, manages to grab and hold attention immediately. While in previous works she reflected with irony on her own contemporary Czech-American experience, she built the latest one on a bizarre, rather exaggerated plot from recent history.
The hero of the book, Miloš Roubal, is a trained bricklayer and a sympathetic profiteer. He lives as the time preaches in an unwritten way. The autumn of 1989 is slowly descending on the South Bohemian village where he lives with his parents. The vision of the end of communist rule is still in sight, but clever citizens like him can manage despite the economic recession and the lack of goods. Because as is well known, whoever does not rob the state robs the family.
When, during one such improvement, the protagonist finds himself on a muddy forest slope somewhere in the border zone during a storm, he slips and rides through a hole in the barbed wire all the way to neighboring Bavaria. At first frightened, the unplanned defector soon gets a taste for the glitz of the Western world. Even if he decides not to emigrate, he will begin to make ample use of the cracks in the Iron Curtain.
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With this novel idea, the author unfolds a broad story, on the main line of which she artfully grafts various relationship micro-dramas, and above all humorously presented, although not unknown, socialist realities. It is precisely thanks to the inventive humor that he injects into the plebeian conversations of the characters, which are about everything and nothing, that he is able to stay with a high bar of fun until the conclusion, which takes place shortly after the fall of the regime.
However, the novel loses a bit of its exaggerated optimism at the same time. To a certain extent, it resembles light-hearted late normalization film comedies, which were supposed to make the audience forget about the not always cheerful reality. In addition, there is almost no sight or hearing of the border guard in the plot, except for one scheming police sniffer, who turns out to be a rather harmless caricature.
Beyond the Line presents a nice, unpretentious memento of the approaching thirty-fifth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution from the point of view of a literary woman who was then experiencing her early youth. If no more is required of him than that, he fully lives up to his claims.
| Daniela Šafránková: Over the line |
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| Argo, 272 pages, 488 CZK |
| Rating: 70% |
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