Truck Stop Rainbows. - book reviews

National Review, April 12, 1993 by Danielle Crittenden

Truck Stop Rainbows, by Iva Pekarkova, translated by David Powelstock (Farrar, Straus, 280 pp., $22)

This novel, by one of the most gifted young writers around, made its author famous in Czechoslovakia, her homeland, and deserves to make her a celebrity in the United States, where she arrived as a refugee in 1985. Miss Pekarkova writes--with that wonderful Czech ability to combine humor with poignancy, tragedy with the absurd, narrative with essay--about growing up in Prague as part of a generation too young to remember the Spring of 1968. Her heroine, Fialka, begins as a free spirit: hitchhiking, engaging in onenight stands with truckers, and photographing the wastelands created by Communism. Slowly, she too corrodes, as her one-night stands turn into paying tricks. It's a coming-of-age novel, of beth a person and an as yet undefined political system.