Popular in the team

Han Paul Taussig, who gained attention in the Czech Republic as The Boy, who survived the death march, takes the reader very vividly back to the 1950s, to the State Publishing House of Fiction, where young Hana, by coincidence, takes up a job as a delivery girl. Pavel Taussig, as a memoirist who worked in a similar enterprise at the time, accurately captures the periods and events in national enterprises under the leadership (or the rampage) of special bosses and thus reveals the principles of (in)functioning of the publishing house and, consequently, of the entire state system.

He presents a very successful snapshot of the world of that time, full of contemporary jokes and stories, written in a light and colourful language that can be understood even by those for whom that time is already far away. This absurd tale of absurd times is at once very human, true and sad, but also extremely funny, with irony and sarcasm seamlessly interspersed with clean humour that genuinely makes the reader laugh. Appropriate language means are then matched with colourful and plastic characters and the whole story has dynamism.

Hannah's youth and optimism stand in direct contrast to the dramatic situation at the time, when she personally has to deal with a major life intervention – forced withdrawal from school and the seemingly unjustified imprisonment of his father; her naivety clashes with the sophistication and intrigue of „ cadre“.

Yet Hana is not just a story of the times, as it might seem, but the story of a man, that reflects that time and that reflects him, whatever he wants, or not, changing.