SYNOPSIS

At the end of the Second World War, in a remote place in Czechoslovakia, Milos, a 22-year-old man who works as a railway worker in a small station where military trains pass by carrying supplies and ammunition to the war front for the German soldiers, anxiously awaits his next meeting with his girlfriend Masa. While the “closely watched” trains pass through the station, and his colleagues are involved in strange sexual scandals, he decides to test his virility, first with the stationmaster’s elderly wife and then with a young partisan who gives him a bomb to blow up one of the special trains. In the end Milos will become the man he so desired to be.

REVIEW

At first the plot seems a little confusing, it’s almost difficult to understand from the first pages what the protagonist is trying to do, but then, as the story progresses, the fog clears, and everything becomes more interesting.
It’s a story written in the first person that manages to stimulate curiosity with its informal register that is sometimes very funny. Each character stands out for some well-defined characteristic and is coherent with the story. But what stick out most are the descriptions that manage to make the reader understand the protagonist’s inner worries. His indifferent way of seeing the world around him, as if he wasn’t really aware of what is happening around him, reflects a very typical behaviour among young people of his age and this makes the reader feel a certain sympathy towards him at some point. It should also be noted that the author initially lingers on telling facts that apparently add nothing to the story, but then everything makes sense and the narration gains greater strength to end in an unexpected way.