Innocence
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Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator and political exile Heda Margolius Kovly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague: her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution and her own persecution at his disgrace, into a smart and evocative psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself.
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There is a mystery in the book, but it is a little hard to follow. Sometimes the last names are used and sometimes the first names of the women are used. Also I listened to it, so reading it might have helped. And there were several twists. The strength of the book is not the mystery though. The strength is the setting. You feel like you are in Czechoslovakia just after World War II. You see how small and contained their lives are, but yet there is more freedoms than I thought under the Communist regime. You get an intimate portrait of women's lives in communist Czechoslovakia. I think that is the best part of the book.
