Macocha

English by Ellen Gallagher

"What a pity that one has to always start with oneself."

I am a writer. I was a writer. I used to be a wife, a mother, an intellectual. I used to be an artist. I did want. I don’t want. I see myself and I see them. My vision is blurred!

The narrator — an Elfriede Jelinek of romantic fiction — stands on a balcony at night, looking down at people. Her memories elude her and graft onto one another. On which bottle’s bottom did the child get lost, where did the love for the man fade away? One Joe, silently shadowing in the images of the past, with five actorial voices in front of him — five phases of life in a feathering identity! Revision of a feminist desire for independence, for individual right to organize one’s own life monologue, yet without barriers and awareness of its consequences?

In her latest novel Petra Hůlová, speaker of the contemporary "café" intellectual literature, sets to examine her own mask of an author-analyst. She turns the leaves and pages and shots of disconnected unchronology of her career experiences. But she is feinting. She is deceiving by the density of her language and by careless sincerity. An insight into multiple tired perspectives of the story introduces a deconstruction of a woman into mere atoms – a choir categorizing and reviewing the taboos of woman’s fate in the shaky tension between self-destruction and healing self-therapy. After all, this is a live existential struggle! It is an attempt to come to terms with one’s own "sleepwalking" through the apartment of the post-capitalist freedom of choice.