2024-08-02 17:01:47
Summer and adolescence belong together. Perhaps it is because of the parable of maturation, the sea of leisure or the sharp sunlight that heralds transformation that this connection is so popular in literature. It was used 100 years ago by the French writer Colette in the book Autumn, as well as recently by Sally Rooney in her first novel Conversations with Friends.
Dorota Ambrožová, a young author from Olomouc, has now introduced her introductory prose, which has a steamy period right in the title. Her novel Last Summer, published by the Listen publishing house, is a candidate for debut of the year.
Fifteen-year-old Hanka defines herself in relation to her parents and actually to everyone except the object of her interest. The usual plot of a girl’s coming of age is confronted by the stubbornness with which she decides to win over a neighbor, a doctor, who is 18 years older. Even his wife’s serious illness does not stop her, on the contrary, she perceives the situation as a good opportunity. Before the reader morally condemns the heroine, he could remember that in the time between childhood and adulthood, the behavior of a young person often does not agree with his feelings, on the contrary, it is in direct conflict with them.
Hanka is a master of masks – she covers sensitivity with insolence, shame with defiantness and the need to share with silence. This combination determines the language of prose written at the same time, sparingly and directly, in short sentences in colloquial Czech full of book expressions, anglicisms and vulgarisms. Ambrožová expresses herself as contradictory and apparently deliberately unbalanced as her protagonist.
“We are like fresh meat at the supermarket counter. They peek at us in the corridors and you can see how their fingers itch. There is also interest in me. I am already quite mature, wild and brash, therefore visible. Soon the word will spread about me that I am also unavailable, ” Hanka comments on her arrival at the gymnasium, dressed in fishnet stockings and shorts below her ass. Each of the roughly 200 pages reveals that the 30-year-old author is in a period of decline, which does not mean at all that it would be necessary to think about the autobiographical nature of the story.
Ambrožová believably conveys the feelings of conflict experienced by teenage girls. They feel sexual desire and, at the same time, understandably resent that men’s eyes are staring hungrily at them. They have a lot on their hearts, but often nothing on their tongues. The adult world seems to them – sometimes justifiably – to be hypocritical, that’s why they don’t spare judgments.
The author of the book, Dorota Ambrožová, studied dramaturgy and screenwriting at JAMU in Brno. | Photo: archive of Dorota Ambrožová
All of this is recorded in the first-person narrative and diary genre, which the author has full control over. He uses it with a clear intention – to show or remind how difficult adolescence is as a period of finding one’s own path and also how strong pressure young people face from loved ones and society.
Hanka is intelligent, creative, comes from a well-off family that can afford a villa in a bigger city, study abroad and vacation several times a year. In this respect, nothing stands in the way of the heroine’s developing self-centeredness, and she can indulge in one cigarette after another on the balcony, as well as thoughts about herself.
She lives in a safe micro world, she always has somewhere to return to and her mom will be waiting there with open arms. This is where the novel differs from other domestic titles from recent years, which at least partially dealt with growing up, such as the novel Rozlóžíš přemů by Marek Torčík or the autobiographical True Way Out by Patrik Banga. Both wanted to confront readers with their personal experience regarding homophobia, racism or poverty. Ambrožová has no such need, she remains inside her heroine.
However, it does not capture just one summer, but five. The school year always just flies by and the important things are concentrated in the vacation months. The title of the book, vague at first glance, thus becomes a metaphor. Hanka thinks every summer that this is who she is, this is how she will be and this is how she intends to make decisions in the future – and she is desperate because she does not feel good about herself.
Although it does not seem so with regard to several excesses, Ambrožová convincingly portrayed the healthy development of a teenage girl without slipping into cheap didacticism. Hanka finally gets her way, but only at the age of 18 – sex with the neighbor is mechanical, however, and she realizes that she doesn’t want such a parody of a relationship.
Gradually, she discovers that she is much closer to an older classmate, who represents a little bit of the dream of every parent of a teenage daughter. Similar to the other male heroes, the reader does not know his name, yet the boy gains importance for the protagonist. He is intelligent, purposeful, patient and attentive to her.
“I fitted him to the firm center of our sporadically dosed weeks together and didn’t allow him to tremble. I usurped all the uncertainty for myself. All the pain and anger and disgust. He’s my medicine dispenser on the nightstand, blinking merrily with multi-colored eyes of relief “, the narrator describes. As he gains insight into his actions, he is able to see others more clearly and figure out what he wants from life.
The author does not fall into banality thanks to her indisputable talent, supported by studying dramaturgy and screenwriting at JAMU in Brno. She transferred the sensitivity, which is an unwritten condition for this field and creative activity in general, to the heroine. That is why Hank is not bored, even though there was no shortage of introductory prose and so-called bildungsromans in the history of literature. Therefore, the writer is able to materialize the complexity of the period that we all had to go through, but few managed to present it so aptly: “I lick your boundaries with a feeling for individual nuances.”
Dorota Ambrožová: Last summer
Publisher Listen 2024, 216 pages, 299 crowns.