Synopsis

How do you survive the rift, the loss of your roots? What remains, how do you reinvent yourself? Katarína returns from Prague to Bratislava to spend Christmas with her family. Adding to the old misunderstandings with her mother is the difficulty of explaining her husband Eugen's absence. But in those few days, she also reconnects with her old college friends, especially Viera, who moved to Italy on a scholarship and is increasingly reluctant to return to Slovakia. The two friends reconnect, recounting their wounds and wounds—Viera with Barbara, who had been their Italian teacher, Katarína with Eugen, who abandoned her two months earlier with a note on the kitchen table. Katarína retraces her relationship with him, from their first meeting to their perhaps premature marriage, the many difficulties of integrating in Prague, and the pain she still can't talk about. And among the memories emerge fragments of life in Bratislava under Communist rule: the abolition of Catholic holidays, censorship, queues for meat and everything else. The "velvet divorce" refers to the separation between Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which in the novel echoes those between Katarína and her husband Eugen, between Viera and a country too narrow for her... It is a story of heavy absences, of betrayals, of feared but unspoken desires, of rifts that require new resources to heal, of uprooting and rebirth—a search for self by the protagonist and her country, both orphaned by a solid past. Jana Karšaiová's versatile and profound writing is extraordinary for an author whose chosen language is Italian. A literary debut of great maturity.