The Long Version [9781642861693]

Overview

In her early fifties, Czech author Sylvie Novak looks back on her successful career. As she embarks on a tour to promote her book of feminist essays—which she’s not convinced has captured the nature of gender inequality—her teenage daughter Judita finds her journals from her youth, discovering the intimate relationship she had with a much older writer. Judita is convinced the experience scarred her for life, whereas Novak considers her daughter’s views to be ignorant and absolutist, however critical she is towards the deep-seated machismo of Eastern European dissident cultures. Meanwhile, the man she loves has found a new, younger object of desire, leaving Novak to reflect on the decline of her sex appeal.

In The Long Version, we become spectators of Novak’s tightrope walk, balancing between the old generation and the new, love and desire, and above all the myriad interpretations of the past. Like Hůlová, Novak seeks not to lay blame or win sympathy, but to explore the shifting meanings of feminism at a time of polarized thinking and, perhaps, discover a path towards reconciliation.