Authors

Susan Reynolds¹;  ¹ British Library, UK

Discussion

In her novel Honzlová: Protestsong (1972) the Czech author Zdena Salivarová (1933-2025) recalls many of her own experiences as a young woman in Prague in the 1950s and the social, political and cultural climate of the times. The narrator, Jana Honzlová, lives in an increasingly decrepit apartment block with her mother, wayward teenage sister and small brother. Because her father and elder brothers (one abroad, the other working in the Jachýmov mines) are politically suspect, she is denied the opportunity to join the folk choir of which she is a talented member on their foreign tours. The novel combines dark humour with a candid account of the spiritual, professional and emotional crises which she experiences, the frustrations of dealing with bureaucracy (with ultimately tragic consequences) and the potential for escape which may prove to be a cunningly-devised trap.
The author is currently working on a new translation of the novel, and examines the sociological conditions in which it evolved, setting it in its political context and that of Salivarová’s subsequent career in Toronto, where she and her husband Josef Škvorecký settled in 1969 and established the publishing company 68 Publishers.