Madres y camioneros

Svetlana, Ivana, Olivia, Lara and Veronika are five women stranded in a life that they detest, five women whose personalities and circumstances could not be more different, and who nevertheless coincide in the same trait: they all perceive their respective mothers as one figure of almost mythical proportions that paralyzes them and condemns them to an eternal childhood. Their stories seem to complement, intersect, contradict each other. Skillfully using the interior monologue and without giving up at any time a look that is both crude, ironic and compassionate, Ivana Dobrakovová focuses on the family, sentimental or sexual relationships of the protagonists, relationships governed by rules and dynamics that feel disconcerting, oppressive or threatening, pushing them to seek some kind of desperate exit or to wage a secret rebellion. Set in the streets of Bratislava and Turin, the five stories that make up Mothers and Truckers, a work awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019, make up an absorbing and polyphonic narrative about the different injuries and traumas that its characters carry, some troubled women who seek their particular survival strategies in a macho and inhospitable world, and whose surprising stories -which oscillate between horror and tenderness, humor and strangeness- reveal Dobrakovová as a skilled speleologist of the feminine inner world.