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In her early fifties, Czech author Sylvie Novak looks back on her successful career. As she embarks on a tour to promote her book of feminist essays—which she’s not convinced has captured the nature of gender inequality—her teenage daughter Judita finds her journals from her youth, discovering the intimate relationship she had with a much older writer. Judita is convinced the experience scarred her for life, whereas Novak considers her daughter’s views to be ignorant and absolutist, however critical she is towards the deep-seated machismo of Eastern European dissident cultures. Meanwhile, the man she loves has found a new, younger object of desire, leaving Novak to reflect on the decline of her sex appeal.
In The Long Version, we become spectators of Novak’s tightrope walk, balancing between the old generation and the new, love and desire, and above all the myriad interpretations of the past. Like Hůlová, Novak seeks not to lay blame or win sympathy, but to explore the shifting meanings of feminism at a time of polarized thinking and, perhaps, discover a path towards reconciliation.
“Petra Hůlová is one of the most distinctive and outspoken Czech writers of her generation.” —Project Plume
Praise for The Long Version
“Petra Hůlová has written a book of disillusionment and reconciliation with passionate feminism, with a particular focus on the body’s physiology.” —PETR FISCHER, literary critic and columnist
“A striking piece of self-criticism that packs a punch. A harsh, bruising and fierce confession of the heroine—an ageing intellectual, mother of two children and lover of many men—uttered in one breath. And so it reads.” —ALENA MACHONINOVÁ, Russian studies scholar
“Can a woman wake up one day and say #MeToo twenty years after the fact? Or does she have to be a member of the #MeToo generation to do that? An extraordinary novel about culture wars in our everyday life.” —TEREZA MATĚJČKOVÁ, philosopher
“Petra Hůlová’s novel gives us the opportunity to experience the changing of two generations, during which the younger group goes into a blind frenzy and sets off on a crusade to condemn the older generation.” —S. D. CH., playwright
Praise for The Movement
“One part Animal Farm, one part The Handmaid’s Tale, one part A Clockwork Orange, and (maybe) one part Frankenstein, Czech writer Hůlová’s novel dismantles the patriarchy and replaces it with a terrifying alternative.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A thought-provoking and disturbing dystopian tale of a feminist revolution.” —Publishers Weekly
“Hůlová’s provocative satire of a feminist future challenges and unsettles in equal parts.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Hůlová wants her readers uncomfortable, and succeeds beautifully, distorting and exaggerating admirable aspirations, asking what we are willing to sacrifice for a better society, and wondering what the New World should look like.” —Calvert Journal
“With echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale but putting the women in charge, The Movement beckons us into a brave new world where men are institutionalised and re-educated—by any means necessary—to value women’s inner worth. The Movement challenges and unsettles, offering a candid glimpse of the underbelly of feminist utopia, and raising important ethical questions about how far we might want or have to go in order to secure a truly equal world. Hůlová’s distinctive voice is crystallised in Alex Zucker’s fierce and flawless translation: this unapologetically provocative story is simultaneously a clarion call, a feminist manifesto, and a warning of the dangers lurking in both the old world and the new.” —HELEN VASSALLO, Translating Women
“In a dystopian future where women rule, society is re-educated to teach men—and women—that women should be valued for traits other than their appearance or age. The novel is dark and satirical; while feminism is in the foreground, the author somehow manages a balancing act between manifesto and critique.” —Lithub
“Hůlová’s story can be read primarily as a timeless fable about how the best of human intentions always end up paving the road to some totalitarian hell.” —Dublin Review of Books
Alex Zucker has translated novels by Zuzana Říhová, Magdaléna Platzová, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, J. R. Pick, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník and Miloslava Holubová. His translation of Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms and Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop received Writing in Translation awards from English PEN; in 2010 he won the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association for his Englishing of Petra Hůlová’s debut novel, All This Belongs to Me; and in 2023 his translation of the Bianca Bellová novel The Lake was the winner of the EBRD Literature Prize.