Systems of tenderness

There is so much to fill a life with, so many similarities of happiness. But in reality, people are always after a little tenderness... Ada Fischer is a gifted young pianist who inherited her exceptional musical talent from her father, along with an unhealthy tendency towards perfectionism. Its gripping and touching story is largely about him, the prematurely deceased successful pianist and organist who left his family and drank himself to death after his career fell apart. Even after all these years, his loss continues to weigh heavily on the girl and has a profound effect on her. The ingeniously pieced together mosaic of selected episodes from the heroine's life, unfolding in the small-town and then Prague backdrops, is thus infused with numerous memories from her childhood and themes related to her missing father - from playing chess and various types of systems applied in human society to the end. In the end, however, it is not "just" a fascinating study of one extraordinary relationship between parent and offspring, nor is it an original tribute to those who have dedicated their lives to a system - from Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, to Scriabin, an avid composer. Ada's story says a lot about ourselves - about what defines us, burdens us and drives us forward. After seven years of writing, the award-winning novelist and screenwriter comes up with a novel that represents his magnum opus and ranks among the most interesting Czech books of the last decade. "Šindelka's new novel is adorned with rich language, mature style and almost poetic imagery. The author portrays the inner world of his heroine with a rarely seen insight, exploring the very nature of human existence by looking inside her." - Reflex "This is a novel that should represent Czech literature abroad." - from reader reviews on Databazeknih.cz "Marek Šindelka has written a novel that feels like a 60-year-old art film. It is slow, it does not create spectacular clusters of sharply cut plot lines, but persistently concentrates on one theme, which it develops to maximum complexity. If the reader accepts that what is essential comes from the whole, and not from how the story ends and what is sloganeered somewhere, a masterpiece awaits. It is quite unique in Czech prose of recent years." - Petr A. Bílek, Seznam Zprávy "Marek Šindelka has invented a rhythmic and melodic style for his subject, which is a radical departure from his previous books. The composition of his prose resembles a perfectly constructed musical composition. In penetrating insights, he points out, how tightly the world of music permeates, programming, human bodies and relationships, how thin the line is between perfection and inhumanity." - Ondřej Nezbeda, Editor "Systems of Tenderness is the story of a daughter, looking for her father. It's a book of longing. A novel about sad abandoned machines. About systems that have long fascinated me: about music, the human body, but also about the mechanisms of the soul. About problems inherited from parents that parasitically shape the lives of children and are passed on through their relationships to other people. And at the same time, it's simply a novel about the human hand. The hand is a strange piece of flesh. How much he remembers! How much he gives and takes. How much she sometimes misses the touches - the old tenderness." - Marek Šindelka, author Ada Fischer watched her hands often. Indeed: The hand is a strange thing when you look at it for a long time. It's a machine. It's a landscape. A peculiar undulating hillock of bones and joints. She's full of tenderness! That mysterious innate tendency of the unguarded hand to curl up. The hand is constantly wrapping in on itself, closing like a flower after dark. As Ada washed her hands, she stared at them in amazement: how they intertwine, how they glide under the current of water one after the other, how they care for each other with indiscriminate and almost rough tenderness. She had inherited those hands from her father - pale, sinewy hands with knuckles that stuck out, with the blue-green branches of veins all too visible beneath the white skin. She inherited his hands and his talent in them. My father's name was Bohumil. He was an excellent pianist and organist. Later an alcoholic. A little later, he was nothing. He wasn't anymore. - excerpt from the book