Queer Love and Violence in a Merciless Future

In her literary debut “Lover/Fighter,” Kristina Hamplová recounts a fairly ordinary girl and four wild episodes from her life. The novel guides readers into a merciless world that could lie just ahead of us. Violence is not an exception there, but an everyday principle.
In 2014, teenage girls in the Brdy forest hunt one another. Five years later, a clash between youth gangs and skaters on the Letná plateau becomes perhaps the largest street fight in Prague’s history.

Childhood in a Hostile World

By 2023, a love affair between two girls gradually becomes a life-and-death duel. Intimacy and threat lie uncomfortably close together. In 2031, the protagonist finally fights in a drought-stricken city against thirsty animals. What initially seems like a sequence of grotesque isolated events coalesces into a portrait of a society in which everyone fights everyone. “Lover/Fighter” traces how a new, unpredictable substance spreads, extracted from the blue flesh of parrots. More than anything, however, the novel tells the story of a childhood and adolescence under conditions that grow harsher with every leap into the future. The heroine grows up in a world where people relentlessly turn on each other. Hamplová blends a coming-of-age narrative with speculative and absurd motifs. The future appears as a continuation of a present in which forthcoming conflicts are already laid out.

Kristina Hamplová comes from a small town near Prague. She writes for various media about music, organizes actions against coal barons, and hosts the pop-cultural podcast “Hitparáda Eso.” She also works as a high school teacher, placing her very much at the pulse of the times.
“Lover/Fighter” (Amazon Affiliate Link) is Hamplová’s literary debut. Her writing has been especially influenced by the works of Roberto Bolaño and Kurt Vonnegut. (dd/pm)