Parrett unfolds her story in impressionistic episodes, much of it from Ludĕk’s perspective, punctuated with snapshots of the family’s history reflecting the cataclysmic events that overtook Czechoslovakia. One day, Malá Liška will see pictures of this cousin she’s never met when his grandmother comes to Australia.
When his mother returns with her partner and a baby, the new family moves away leaving Ludĕk’s whole world behind. Ludĕk doesn’t know his Aunty Máňa and Uncle Bill’s story but he knows not to mention the war. Eva and Máňa talk while Ludĕk and Bill walk the city, often revisiting the house that Bill lived in when he was called Vilém. The sisters’ reunions are full of reminiscence. Malá Liška has never met her cousin, staying with her uncle for six weeks while her adored grandparents are away. He and her grandmother cut every corner so that Máňa can visit her sister Eva and their grandnephew, Ludĕk, every four years. Once an engineer, her grandfather works as a night watchman. Meanwhile, his cousin Malá Liška lives with her grandparents in a Melbourne apartment decorated as if it’s been transported from Prague. Ludĕk’s mother is a dancer, on tour with the Black Theatre, only allowed out of the country if her son stays at home, and his father is dead.
In 1980, Ludĕk runs up and down the streets of Prague before flying home to his grandmother’s tiny flat. It’s clear from its dedication that There Was Still Love is a tribute to her beloved grandparents, borne out by her note at the end of this lovely novel that takes us back and forth from Prague to Melbourne in the early ‘80s, following two sisters separated in 1938 at the beginning of the German occupation. It was its Antarctica setting that first attracted me but it was Parrett’s gorgeous writing that left me wanting more. Australian writer Favel Parrett’s beautifully expressed When the Night Come made quite an impression on me when it was published in the UK back in 2014.
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