Quality of life

Quality of Life is my final novel. I have no strength left. I’m simply dying. I’ve chosen the church and the songs. And why Quality of Life? I hear everywhere how brave people fight cancer and all that. But they don't. They don't fight. They swallow pills, get infusions, and some of them get lucky. I wish them that from the bottom of my heart, but unfortunately, that’s not my case.
As I say – some of them. Sometimes it also depends on how important they are. I’d like to be that important too. Then they probably wouldn't be sending me home to die. To be honest, I resisted it and was generally quite a nuisance.
So, that's where I end. And now all that's left is to choose a little dress for my little coffin.” Jana Rečková
Jana Rečková's Quality of Life is typical of the author's work in that it is atypical and difficult to categorise. What we have here are her memories, diary entries, a raw confession of a person resisting cancer. From this autobiographical confession grow three separate stories, three short stories that, like vines, twist around the trunk of the narrative and are connected to it by verses of brutally honest poetry. It is not certain, however, which of these lines is the vine and which is the trunk; they are intertwined and difficult to separate.
Siena: A short story on the border between reality and horror, echoing Jana's title 24 and 1/2 Hours a Day. It could be pure sci-fi, if only it described a wondrously changeable Vertical House (perhaps with a thousand floors), if infernal flames weren't licking on some of its levels and attacking corpses weren't climbing out of graves on others.
Murder in Hajia: A classic detective story with a romantic relationship motif that develops between the detective and a seamstress. However, because the seamstress sews dresses from feathers, sand, bark and beech leaves, and maybe sometimes even a dress from tears, and because the young detective can fly – as can everyone in Hajia, provided they live a balanced inner (and sexual) life and nothing weighs them down – it is pure fantasy.
The Settlement: A story of four independent adolescent children living under domes in the bleakly beautiful world of an alien planet harks back to the roots of the genre, to Jules Verne's Two Years' Vacation. Except that here it was a long eight years. We find ourselves at the end of them, when the now-grown children set out to find the parents who abandoned them for an unknown reason. Besides, all the settlers have left their domes and never returned. So far, pure sci-fi. But the discovery of enchanted people and locals evokes the feeling of a fairy tale rather than fantasy.
The author wrote her ultimate text in the reality of an imminent threat of death and paid little heed to whether she would 'offend' anyone while writing – partly because she did not believe that any publisher would take on this trans-genre work. And before Christmas 2016, she was indeed sent home to die. Fortunately, a new study emerged that gave Jana another year, in which a publisher also appeared. It's a shame she didn't live to see the book published. As she wrote: “Not living to see it is a real pain when you’re curious.”