Ivana Dobrakovová

A set of five long-short stories, three of them set in Bratislava and two in Turin, each from the point of view of a woman who doesn’t fit easily into the world and has a difficult relationship with her mother. The narrator of the first story has had a nervous breakdown after her father’s long decline into mental illness and alcoholism; Ivana is launching into an unwise relationship with a fashionable journalist as she recovers from the psychiatric consequences of a traumatic incident at a riding school (think Equus); schoolteacher Olivia struggles with loneliness after a divorce, and obsesses about the recent high-profile murder of a lonely middle-aged teacher; Lara seems to have given up hope of saving her marriage but tries, without a great deal of conviction or success, to be a good mother to her two young sons (think Days of abandonment); Veronika is comically deep into an obsession with chatting up strange men on the internet (‘to practice French’), and is now heading for a blind date with a Belgian trucker that might end up as anything but comic.

The five narratives aren’t quite linked — the characters are in their own closed worlds and don’t seem to know each other — but they do have little points of intersection, and they all end in the same slightly unexpected way.

Dobrakovová is Elena Ferrante’s translator in her day job, and there are a lot of similarities in style here, especially in Lara’s story — although obviously the Turin settings encourage the reader to think that anyway. The subject-matter is fairly dark, but she manages to relieve it with enough comedy to keep us engaged with her difficult characters and reading the book. We are held at a slight ironic distance, enough to see the absurdity of the characters from the world’s point of view at the same time as seeing how impossible it is from their own point of view to break out of the bad place they have got into. Very nicely done.… (mehr)