A fascinating tale of the female soul, magic and a part of Czech history kept hidden.
In the heights of the White Carpathians, dotted sparsely across the hills, there are a number of crouched buildings. Everything is far away, which is why, so they say, certain women there have succeeded in preserving knowledge and intuition the rest of us have lost, which they have passed from generation to generation for centuries. They are known as goddesses, because they are able to connect with God and ask for His help. And His interventions do help a little ... It is said of the goddesses that they see the future. So why haven’t they saved their own?
Dora Idesová is the last of the goddesses. She is reluctant to accept an outdated way of life and to read in drips of wax the futures of those who come to her, as her aunt Surmena did. But everything changes once she understands that personal circumstances she has always considered unhappy – being sent to a boarding school, Jakoubek’s institutional care, hospitalization an asylum in Kroměříž – is part of a carefully thought-out plan. It is the late 1990s, and in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior in Pardubice there is a file awaiting discovery – a file compiled by the State Security police on an enemy of the state, her aunt Surmena. A disbelieving Dora untangles details of the previously unknown fates of her family and other goddesses ...
Were the goddesses a danger to incredulous patients? Were they a genuine ideological threat to society in the years of Normalization? Or was the eradication of the last relics of paganism the work of common human envy and spite?
Awards:
Josef Škvorecký Prize 2012, Czech Bestseller Prize 2012, Magnesia Litera 2013 - Readers' award; Czech Book Award 2013 - Readers' Award, Premio Salerno Libro d’Europa 2018 (for the Italian translation of the book, published by Keller Editore)
