Obsessed with Death

Marie is traveling by train — alone, wounded in both body and soul, watching through the window as the landscape slips away while her thoughts return to her family and to memories of her sister, who took her own life. Marie blames herself for her sister’s death, although no one truly knows the real cause of the tragedy — and it is precisely this uncertainty that becomes her heaviest burden. From this family-album-like text, where events flicker in a kaleidoscopic whirl, people slowly disappear: a mother who could not bear the weight of responsibility for her child’s illness, a sister whose death remains a mystery, and Marie herself, balancing on the edge between life and the desire to vanish. The reader gradually learns that after her sister’s death, Marie repeatedly tried to end her own life as well, each time stopping at the very last moment.
Marie searches for answers to the questions that torment her in modern spirituality and old Czech traditions, trying to find a way to go on living despite every wound she has suffered. It is a novel about the fact that the hardest battles are fought in our own minds — and about the fragile line between despair and the decision to remain.