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In Jana Juráňová's prose Family Celebration, the narrator undertakes an introspective road movie along the paths of her memories of youth and adulthood, related to her wider family background. Various small stories from her unwritten family history become part of the associative stream. The impetus is the celebration of the narrator's cousin's sixtieth birthday, a fairly standard event that takes place according to the unwritten but nonetheless firm rules of a middle-class family somewhere in our countryside. Present and absent characters from her life, as well as those she knows only from hearsay, emerge before the narrator's inner gaze. When, somewhere in the middle of the story, a sudden plot switchhappens, the observer becomes a direct participant in the action. In this prose, the author explores our roots, the past not so much in historical as in mental and emotional form, and the ways in which the often displaced events of the normalization period of the 1970s and 1980s may have inscribed themselves in people's destinies, shapinghowwe perceive reality today, and how it translated into the ways in which we view, decide, act, and judge contemporary events and phenomena.
