Double chapel

Alena Wagnerová is well known as an oral historian, journalist, short story writer, and biographer of cultural figures. Her novella Dvojitá kaple occupies a unique place in her body of work, offering an intimate confession about childhood, adolescence, and a young woman's journey into adulthood, with the parent-child relationship forming the backbone of the narrative.

The novella stands out above all for its intensity. Although an introspective piece of prose – a stream of inner monologues, dialogues, and memories of the female protagonist – a genuine drama of a single life, or rather a single family, unfolds before the reader's eyes. It is all the more powerful because most of us have experienced it ourselves in some form and to some degree. For children, the family is a place of safety and love, but also of defiance, resistance, and sometimes alienation. The standards and expectations that parents place on their children are often out of step with those they apply to themselves – and the same applies to the children.

Wagnerová's powerful prose leads to a catharsis of understanding, forgiveness, and finding a way back to one another. This is no mere cliché, but a search experienced to the very last sentence and word. The seemingly mundane realisation that parents are, first and foremost, a man and a woman – human beings with all their weaknesses – speaks to the reader with extraordinary power thanks to its artistic and human truth.