A tragicomic mosaic reflecting one stage in a young woman's life
The main character of Tereza Semotamová's new prose work is living in an unhappy relationship abroad; after her partner's unexplained death, she returns to her home country, where she has nowhere to live (in fact, she doesn't even know how), and so she makes do with a wardrobe her sister intends to throw away. She places the wardrobe in a courtyard and moves into it.
The bizarre premise of the text gradually becomes a metaphor for the search for one's place in this world, onto which relationships with family, men, friends, and oneself are projected. We witness the heroine's struggle for bare existence; although the narrator suppresses it, in the end, there is no other choice. Summer is ending, and the wardrobe is starting to leak.
The unnamed narrator guides us through her life crisis, which resulted from a recently ended, tormenting relationship. However, her narration does not get bogged down in any sighing self-pity (which this type of writing so often fails to avoid), thanks primarily to the liveliness of the language, imbued with slang, pop-culture references, and all sorts of puns, into which, however, “higher,” more abstract registers occasionally break, especially in the reflective, almost meditative passages that form a kind of refrain to the narrator's monologue.
Thus, a tragicomic mosaic gradually unfolds before the reader, reflecting one stage in a young woman's life, a stage full of discoveries and losses, of stagnation, but also of the determination to live differently and the longing for love.
