We take what we get: CD mp3

Pavla, the heroine of the generational novel We Take What We Have, was born after the Second World War. Her grandparents, brickmakers from the suburbs of Vienna, accepted President Beneš's call to foreign Czechs, and returned to their original homeland. She was conceived by a nineteen-year-old Viennese woman and a Slovak man of the same age, and her father had to enlist in the army and behaved like any young man who is not burdened with contraceptives. The young mother divorced and remarried, this time to a typical good guy. In his adolescence, Paul, to his mother's displeasure, copies the form and character of the rejected begetter. After graduation, she will go to a factory instead of further studies. He flees his home from the manifestations of psychopathic hysteria and the kitchen matriarchy, finding refuge with the oddballs and figures rejected by the city. A dramatic relationship with a bohemian and a drunkard ends with her being hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital. Finally, she sets off for her father's country, experiencing the joy of acceptance and the intoxication of the landscape of the Slovak Paradise, but her longing for Prague forces her to leave. The story of a vital and sensitive heroine, who is drawn to joy and full-blooded experience, takes place in an atmosphere of small-town and regimented spying and framing. The novel We Take What Is, first published in 2005, was gratefully received by readers, kindly received by reviewers and nominated for the Magnesia Litera literary award. Its rich plot is spiced with self-irony and humour. It is followed by the second part of Occupied and the third part of We Know Our Own.