Waiting for the trigger

A novel in eight stories about bad decisions, misunderstanding and hope

Zuzana goes to the sea to erase a terrifying dream. Jitka is ashamed of her belly and doesn't want to compare herself with anyone. Hana finds her grandmother on a random car trip. Pavel has found peace while working in the forest and doesn't want to mess anything up anymore. Iveta dresses the dead and hides a tattooed snake. And Libor just takes pictures... They belong together, they are in a way one family, yet they pass each other by.

To live a human life is also to find meaning in the everyday. Not only through spiritual fulfillment or a liberating experience, but also in the midst of the numbing ordinariness of being confronted with our loved ones; with those we love and those who have hurt us. But experiences, emotions, gestures and spoken words are perhaps too often missed, and instead of understanding, wrongs, white spaces and pain proliferate. But every such passing is also a call - for empathy and perhaps even forgiveness.

The short story novel Waiting for the Trigger is a chronicle of such a passing, spread over seventy years. In a concentrated form, the book looks at how seemingly unimportant decisions by some people affect the lives of others, and how an inconspicuous event can affect someone we have no idea about. Each of the main characters in Waiting for the Trigger tells Waiting for the Trigger from their own perspective, each trying to make sense of their story. And while finding one is often losing the other, it is never too late to reconcile and forgive. At least towards ourselves.

They wrote about Waiting for the Trigger

The heroes and mostly the heroines of the stories bear their fate bravely, with a certain amount of reconciliation and understanding, and often even self-sacrifice, as if they believed that somewhere in the future, the peace and a bit of happiness they hoped for themselves awaits the next generation. Lidmila Kábrtová's readable and truthful book offers the reader the pleasure of pictures of life painted in words and the feeling that the stories in the book are actually about us.

Alena Mornštajnová, writer

I was really looking forward to this book, the calendar from spring recorded the date of 15.10., when it was supposed to come out. Still, the number one book for me remains Who Will the Foxes Drink. Waiting for the Trigger is a collection of beautiful stories, written in beautiful Czech. That's why I'm giving it five stars, although I'll have to read it again because I missed the connections between the stories and characters. I was probably not focused enough, due to the circumstances I couldn't read the so-called. "in one go", which this book deserves and would certainly have made the interconnectedness of the characters' fates more understandable to me.

saruse

As I expected, Lidmila Kábrtová's new book is great. It consists of eight short stories, which are interconnected and together form a de facto novel. Although the characters are diverse, I can understand all of them, I can empathize with all of them. In short stories it often happens that someone has understood or experienced something in a certain way, but the same event has been understood or experienced in a completely different way by someone else, it all depends on the point of view of the character and their life setting. The overall mood is rather melancholic, there's a lot of talk about death, injustice, of luck or fateful missteps, and I personally take a message from reading it, that we're supposed to enjoy every day, because we really don't know, what could happen in the next few seconds, minutes or hours.
Waiting for the Trigger is the author's third book, and I definitely recommend her first book, Who Will the Foxes Drink, as well as her book of short stories, Places in the Dark.

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Waiting for the trigger