Maria is a widow in her 60s, who earns extra money by babysitting, is preparing to go the wedding of her daughter Rosa’s. The moment she wishes Rosa well after the ceremony, she feels she has lost her forever. Retirement age, lack of money, the feeling of becoming invisible and the physical deterioration make her look for ways to matter again. Instead of babysitting, she gets hired by families to take care their needy grandparents. She takes the caring task a step further by crossing sexual boundaries. It ends in and uncomfortable encounter with the families. 

Marie’s narrative is occasionally interrupted by Rosa’s story, about her ambitions to become a writer, about the arduous path through artificial insemination to get pregnant, her worries about motherhood, and about her thoughts of her mother. She makes all sorts of imaginings about what might have happened to her, where she is. And she starts writing, and her sentences are the ones that started the book.

Bodies is a novel with its finger on the pulse of several present-day issues in Czech society, chief among them mother-daughter relationships, viewed through the lenses of feminism and late-stage capitalism. The other hot-button topic explored in the novel is the family, and society’s, treatment of elderly people: our appreciation of them, or, on the contrary, our view of them as an irksome burden. And, of course, it is a novel about the body, about women’s bodies, as they change through old age, and through pregnancy, changing women as people and how they are regarded and treated.

“Written in language that is down-to-earth yet precise, Bodies is an intimate and harrowing work of introspection.”

— Respekt

“A psychological exploration of the female soul that has long been lacking in Czech literature.”

— Czech Television

“An original Czech novel about old age. In this book old bodies sometimes rise and young ones fail.”

— Aktuálně

Translations