Systems of tenderness

Isn't human life sometimes like a mechanism? And how much tenderness can be hidden in a machine?

Pianist Ada Fischer has a glittering career ahead of her, but the core of her existence has been extinguished. What is he really after? Isn't he just trying to please his dead father? With his loss, something in her broke down forever. The only long-term "love relationship" she maintains is with her musical instrument, and it is as if she herself is slowly becoming a machine, an automaton fulfilling a single sad function.

A novel about obsession, about longing, about the mechanisms of the soul. About the problems inherited from parents that parasitically shape the lives of children and are passed on through their relationships. Ada's story mirrors the fates of people who have also devoted themselves to various systems - music, the chessboard, the algorithm. As the inventor of the metronome Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, as the composer and pianist Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, as Ada's lover Hans.

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Marek Šindelka has invented a rhythmic and melodic style for his subject, which is a radical departure from his previous books. The composition of his prose resembles a perfectly constructed musical composition. In penetrating insights, he points out how closely the world of music, programming, human bodies and relationships are intertwined, how thin the line separating perfection and inhumanity is.
— Ondřej Nezbeda, editor

Systems of Tenderness is the story of a daughter searching for her father. It's a book of longing. A novel about sad abandoned machines. About systems that have long fascinated me: about music, the human body, but also about the mechanisms of the soul. About problems inherited from parents that parasitically shape the lives of children and are passed on through their relationships to other people. And at the same time, it's simply a novel about the human hand. The hand is a strange piece of flesh. How much he remembers! How much he gives and takes. How much she sometimes misses the touches - the old tenderness.
— Marek Šindelka, author