A coming of age story set somewhere in the 80's I suppose. An inside look at what life must have been like for a girl growing up in Prague admist the dregs of communism, tied to strict rules of what and what isn't allowed conduct and behaviour, while also dealing with her own puberty and drama at home.
(Review below copied from the publisher's website)
One of the most popular Czech prose works to be written since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Irena Dousková’s loose trilogy carries on from B. Proudew with Onegin Was a Rusky, set when the false dawn of perestroika was at its falsest.
Although the place, time and narrative perspective of a primary school pupil has given way to the standpoint of a grammar school student facing her final exams, the focus in Onegin Was a Rusky is still that of a stylized diary confession.
A series of tragi-burlesque events is threaded over a timeframe of around twelve months, this time in the mid-1980s, to reveal the fortunes of a family trying to retain at least a little normality within the confines of ‘normalized’ harassment.
This is not easy to do when time almost stands still, and Prague is “dirty, grey and all dug-up, with all kinds of scaffolding and cordons around”, while those who dwell there “humiliate you, insult you, put you down…” and basically “make life as nasty as possible for each other”. Helena Součková, the same central character as in B. Proudew, is thus placed in a quandary: How is a seventeen-year- old girl to come to terms with her body and soul, when her alcoholic mother is always throwing tantrums, her émigré father shows no interest, and various monstrous screwed-up characters at school persecute her in the name of agitprop ideology? The gloom can sometimes be combatted with the help of a little poetry, some bright-spark schoolkid pranks and above all humour, because “what was left but to make fun of it all?”
(By Radim Kopáč, Právo)