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The Naked

Original title: Nazí
Publisher: Paseka, Prague, 2009
220 pages
Age: 12+

Award:

  • Winner of the prestigious Czech Magnesia Litera Award for best children's and Young Adult literature
  • Nominated for the prestigious German award Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis
The book has been published in Germany, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Turkey and France.

The Naked is a YA novel about growing up. The title refers to the emotional nakedness that is experienced particularly intensely during puberty.

A hot summer, Berlin and the rural, idyllic borderland between the Czech Republic and Saxony in Germany – this is the backdrop to the story that is not told as a linear sequence of events. Five young people find themselves at a crossroads. Whether they want to or not, they must decide how to continue. Sometimes their paths intersect, sometimes they run parallel, while at other times they simply bypass each other. Without realizing it, they are asking themselves the same questions and facing similar problems.

It is, in fact, five individual stories that make sense only when considered together. They all deal with one single quantity, known and, at the same time, unknown: the generation that is growing up today.

Sylva has an above-average IQ, she is unrestrained, instinctive. Her Czech father and her German mother live separately but are still undecided about divorce. Sylva feels split by her constant shuttling between the two of them. The time she spends in Berlin is like a walk through a jungle with random events and fateful encounters determining which trail is taken.

Niklas is on the verge of adulthood but still a long way from maturity. His love for Evita gradually turns his life into a mad carousel of drug abuse which is difficult to jump off of. Although Evita lives right in the middle of a big city, her own private world removes her further and further from reality. Instead of attaining her dream of freedom, she succumbs, step by step, to inescapable addiction – not only to the drugs but also to the people that provide them. At the time she meets Niklas she is unable to reciprocate fully his feelings of affection for her.

Filip presents himself to the world as an intellectual, but an unplanned demonstration of environmentalists, his encounter with the energetic Berenika, and a conflict with the police, which ends in a brawl and his arrest, all of this turns his world of adopted values upside down during one turbulent evening. In the end he is capable of a splendidly crazy gesture of nakedness, and when he has offended everyone, it’s over.

Robin has his circle of friends and does not allow anyone else to enter. His aloofness dates from one evening in a mountain cabin when he is accused of raping one of his classmates. Despite the fact that his father, a lawyer, succeeds in having the charges dropped thereby rescuing his son from this delicate situation, Robin, after this experience, becomes very reserved and is unable to establish new relationships. Meeting Sylva is a milestone on his journey to maturity.

The Naked is a story that captures the ordinary life of today’s seventeen-year-olds. What unites all the characters is not only their age and the psychological state of vulnerability and over-sensitivity characteristic of adolescence, but also their otherness. What they have in common is that they don’t want to be molded into uniformity. They all seek a path to freedom, an escape from the iron shirt of custom and rules.

The author follows her characters with a highly sensitive camera in order to pause and record wherever something gets under the skin.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
For me an amazing book full of wonderful wisdom, I loved all the stories and long to return to the book someday.
Reader’s review on www.cbdb.cz

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