We are Here: A Novelette in Ten Stories

Jan Balabán

We are Here is a cycle of ten separate stories closed up in a circle of a common fate. Jan Balaban, one of the most remarkable Czech writers of the 20th century, shows his personages in the most dramatic moments of their lives when everything around them, their stereotypes, their views, and even their physical and mental health, crushes into nothingness. Driving his characters to the edge, Balaban tries to reveal the very roots of every single human tragedy, to untangle the knot of disfigured family relations, to discover intimate personal problems of his heroes and their traumas caused by historical reality. But at the same, adding some slight hint from the outside — a knock at the door, a smile, a glimpse of an old picture on the wall — Balaban turns a sand glass of their lives upside down, and gives them one more chance to take their hearts and say: we are here. And by we he means not just the characters of these ten stories but people in general, people as a part of an endless novelette of human life with its eternal hope of joy.