Peasant Baroque

It's easy to say to draw a line under the past.

Most people are not indifferent to their origins and genealogist Pavel Straňanský has made a business out of it. However, along with information about ancestors, dirt often surfaces that their descendants certainly don't want - but it can be very useful to someone else. His new commission concerns the fate of a South Bohemian village, which was severely affected by forced collectivisation in the 1950s. How it really was with the local beauties and the peasants who were called the so-called. kulaks? However, the answers that he gradually discovers in his almost detective-like investigation reach into the present and do not add to the lonely truth-seeker's peace of mind. And into this he starts to get an eyeful of the attractive Daniela, who reminds him so much of his ex-wife, who left Pavel with their young son.

The second novel by Jiří Hájíček, who is himself the grandson of a South Bohemian kulak, won the Magnesia Litera Award for prose in 2006.