Three brothers return to the family cabin by the lake, where none of them have ventured for twenty years. They bring an urn with ashes and are going to fulfill their mother’s unexpected last wish. However, the joint journey will take them not only through a familiar landscape, but also through time. Suddenly they are boys again with tanned legs and eager eyes, competing for their father’s favor and their mother’s fickle love, who have only each other in the world and maybe no one at all. Now they stand here as grown men, so alien to each other, yet inextricably bound by the shackles of the past. The fateful place mercilessly brings to the surface carefully buried memories and bitterness that drives a wedge between the brothers again. How can a home steeped in uncertainty mark a child’s soul? And what really happened that summer when everything fell apart?
“You can’t help but cry over the fate of the three brothers: over the men they became, over the boys they used to be, over how cruelly they lost their childhood innocence. Amazing, heavy, unforgettable,” reviewed the book by another master of the pen, Fredrik Backman, author of the bestsellers Anxieties and Their People and A Man Called Ove. He is not wrong in the slightest. The book, which at first appears to be a fond recollection of the transition from boyhood to manhood, is overwhelming in its denouement. When reading it and especially listening to the audiobook version, you literally feel the physical pain somewhere inside.
Listen to a sample of the audiobook:
At the same time, she enters carefully, on tiptoe, stealthily… To then strike with a force from which there is no escape. And in the service of the story, Ondřej Brousek, carefully tuned by director Michal Bureš, comes with his next “touchdown”, that is, after our hit in the black. In the field of the spoken word, Brousek has already written the no less excellent book The Rainmaker by John Grisham or The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley.
Alex Schulman (born 1976) is a Swedish writer and journalist. He co-creates the most popular Swedish podcast Alex & Sigge and writes columns for the newspaper Expressen. He made his debut as a writer in 2007. | Viktor Fremling
But back to the story written by Alex Schulman, a Swedish writer and journalist, whose first novel From the Ashes (2020) immediately became a bestseller in Sweden after its publication and the copyright was sold to thirty-three countries. Fortunately, including the Czech Republic. As we have already mentioned, Brousek is for her (nomen omen) a really polished storyteller. He smoothly manages boyish positions in which he serves the innocent parts of the story and follows up with the mature speech of grown-up brothers. It captures that special atmosphere of memories in which the occasional thorn stings in a futile effort for parental affection or a seemingly beautiful moment is violently destroyed by an unexpected blow. Brousek guides the reader through a gradual insight, in which he unfolds the aforementioned pain slowly and gracefully like a silk handkerchief. You wouldn’t expect this! – communicates when you really least expect it. Out of the Ashes is a story that will grip your throat, attack your biggest emotions. And Brousek masterfully serves it all up, as if nothing had gone wrong. Just the way the writer apparently wanted it, as he similarly composed word for word. Thus, “from the ashes” emerge destinies that you won’t get out of your head for a long time.
Rating: 95%
Alex Schulman
From the ashes
Performer & music: Ondřej Brousek
Director: Michal Bureš
Publisher: OneHotBook, 2022
Length of recording: 6 hours, 50 minutes
Book publisher: Guest, 2022
Number of pages: 246