Hives
E-book, Czech
Hives
How much are we willing to sacrifice to survive? And do we still remain human?
Úlice is a town displaced in space and time. It's even missing from some maps of the Czech-German borderlands. Its inhabitants have kept bees since time immemorial, their lives steeped in sweetness. But then a concentration camp appears right in the middle of town…
Anežka, Běla, and Helena grew up in Úlice and have known each other since childhood. Each had her own unremarkable plans, but the presence of the camp and German soldiers dramatically changes them. And with them, their characters.
Jakuba Katalpa has written a ruthless and multi-layered novel that is more than just another contribution to the genre of historical fiction from the Second World War. It uncompromisingly explores questions of freedom, moral responsibility, and personal boundaries.
Reviews:
Among the important qualities of the prose is the narration through the experience of the body, which perceives and records much faster than consciousness and which is always necessarily situated in a specific context. Furthermore, it is above all a certain “freshness” of style and also the absence of a clear-cut judgment of the characters' actions, thanks to which much is left unsaid and the reader has enough space for themselves.
- Olga Słowik on the novel Zuzana's Breath, iLiteratura.cz
Every situation has its charm and deserves to be described. This was discovered by Goncharov or Proust, for example. I also like that one situation can be viewed from several perspectives, like when you put a glass prism to your eye and the light begins to break down into a colourful spectrum.
- Jakuba Katalpa, author
Jakuba Katalpa
(b. 1979) after her exceptionally successful debut Is Soil for Eating?, published the novel The Hot Sea (2009) and, four years later, the prose work Germans, for which she received the Josef Škvorecký Award, the Czech Book Award, and was nominated for the Magnesia Litera award. In 2017, the sophisticated, multi-layered contemporary novel The Den was published, and her next novel, Zuzana's Breath (2020), has so far been her most successful with readers.
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Basic
Format & type of protection
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