Truck stop rainbow

"Fialka is determined to be an outsider in the Czechoslovakia of the early eighties. Instead of pursuing her psychology studies (Freud is dribbled out in carefully censored bits), she spends her time hitchhiking. She delights in passionate one-night stands with Czech truck drivers, and travels all over the country documenting the devastation of the natural world. She specializes in photographing monstrous pollution-induced mutant plants." "When her best friend, Patrik, develops multiple sclerosis, Fialka sets out to earn the money to buy him a wheelchair (the socialist state has a ten-year waiting period) by throwing herself into prostitution with the international truck drivers who pass through Czechoslovakia with hard currency and Western treats for the women they pick up along the highway. In her quest, Fialka discovers another, far less likable, self. What she once did from pure exuberance, from a desire to experience everything possible, she now does with a calculated purpose, and she is changed." "Truck Stop Rainbows offers a startling portrait of a country in which both nature and human life have been reduced to a poor, passive imitation of what they once were. But Fialka refuses to accept the limitations of her world, and hers is not a grim tale. Charged with eroticism - the descriptions of Fialka's sexual encounters, most of which take place in the cabs of trucks, are both graphic and lyrical and are told from a very feminine perspective - Truck Stop Rainbows is an engaging, unsentimental, and, paradoxically, hopeful novel."--BOOK JACKET.