Simona Bohatá's novella Everyone's Embarrassing
Žižkov of the 1980s, a world unto itself. It is rare to go to Prague. Estebians, hookers and extortionists may cross the border in both directions, but children, cripples and abused animals are only at home in Žižkov. In the prose All Are Embarrassing, the margins of society are stripped away. We mainly follow Boža and Růza, Šimona, Martin and other children from one class, who are trying to grow up under the supervision of their teacher Jury. But where to? There's a reason
Simona Bohata's novella has an immersive atmosphere. The place is the periphery, the time is the normalization timelessness, the main characters are children. And the language is the living Prague language, the language of passages, courtyards and pavilions. From the fragmentary structure of the narrative, a picture of a strange world that has disappeared gradually emerges. However, there is little that is more distant from this novel than some kind of normalization nostalgia. Everybody's Embarrassing is a sharp prose from a time when it was all too easy to ruin someone's life. And myself especially.