Systems of Tenderness is a musically based novel constructed on the principle of canon and counterpoint, where one voice chases another without being able to catch up with it. One human life is a model for a subsequent life, one trauma forms the basis for a new trauma in a subsequent generation, as a kind of inevitable, painful notation of emotion.  The whole story rolls in on itself, in a bitter, inevitable repetition. A literary fugue.

The book tells the story of pianist Ada Fischer.  We follow her career as a pianist, her complicated relationships with her father and mother, her student love at the music academy and her career switch to the field of Human Intelligence Tasks where she develops algorithms for AI.

Ada’s entire life revolves around her relationship with her father Bohumil, who left when Ada was very young. It is a search for her him, for his love, for who he was. Ada’s life has the character of a mournful examination of the mechanism of abandonment. All her relationships with men suffer fundamentally from that tension. Her solidarity with her father manifests itself in a perpetual repetition of leaving, a perpetual abandonment. Either she must abandon and suffer, or she must abandon and hurt herself – and thus get closer to her father, to ‘meet him in betrayal’.

  Systems of Tenderness is an intimate novel – and probably Šindelka’s most personal work. However it does not lack a major social theme: the role of artificial intelligence in our lives in conjunction with the pursuit of perfection, with the most important fact that the boundary between man and machine is becoming diffuse. Can one still distinguish between man and machine, and in a metaphorical sense, is man in the machine – as in the mechanical, chess-playing Turk – or the machine in man, And what to think of  it when Ada plays perfect music like a machine?

 At its core, the book revolves around the hand—that limb capable of independent thought, that plays the piano as if by itself. Everything is contained within the hand: sorrow, anger, and tenderness. The hand as a metaphor for life. As is often the case, Šindelka is fascinated by the body, and this emerges more powerfully here than ever before 

 As one would expect the novel is solidly constructed. Throughout the story one discovers connections, analogies, repetitions of motifs and so forth, creating a nicely completed narrative.  Once again, it is clear that Šindelka is breaking new literary ground – rather than writing the same book over and over again.

“Marek Šindelka has written a novel that feels like a 60-year-old art film. It is slow-paced; it does not create flashy clusters of sharply edited plot lines, but instead focuses steadfastly on a single theme, which it develops to its fullest complexity. If the reader accepts that what is essential emerges from the whole, rather than from how the story ends or what is declared in a slogan-like manner, a masterpiece awaits. It is entirely unique in Czech prose of recent years.eview goes here”

— Seznam Zprávy

“The novel Systems of Tenderness is a focused and intellectually stimulating book that confirms Marek Šindelka’s ability as an author to conjure a broader cultural diagnosis from psychological details. It would come as no surprise if he were to win the Literary Critics’ Award or another Magnesia Litera next year.

-Aktuálně.cz

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