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Great Translations: No Saints or Angels by Ivan Klima
Life is tough. Here is a woman, a struggling dentist, divorced and a single mom. She blames herself for the dissolution of her marriage, even though her ex-husband cheated on her. Now her ex- is dying from cancer and she still feels responsible to go to his flat and care for him.
Some spoilers follow.
The Story: Her father has recently died and she is helping her mother through that crisis. She learns she has a half-brother, the result of her tyrannical father’s philandering, and this half-brother is sending her threatening letters.
As if that is not enough to deal with, her teen-aged daughter is on drugs. At first it was just a suspicion and then came the full-blown lying and stealing and now the daughter’s headed for re-hab.
While all this is going on, our heroine has a much younger man interested in her. But she can’t let the relationship develop because she can’t get past worrying about when he will leave her. She is good at self-sabotage.
If you see issues you’re dealing with in this review, you might want to read this book. In part it’s a practical manual about dealing with a kid on drugs. There is always hope.
The Setting: It’s set in Prague around the time of the book’s first publication, 1999. Translated from Czech by…
