- Hardcover: 436 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (Jan 23 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679444114
- ISBN-13: 978-0679444114
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 16.3 x 4.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 839 g
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Josef Skvorecky, as a Czech émigré and Canadian citizen, seems an unlikely chronicler of the American Civil War. On closer examination, however, Skvorecky's choice of subject matter in his novel The Bride of Texas makes a great deal of sense: he has spent his career struggling with problems of nationalism, totalitarianism, and the crushing effects of history on the individual spirit, from his pre-immigration writings such as The Bass Saxophone to his great later works, including The Engineer of Human Souls.
He centres The Bride of Texas on a largely historical group of Czech combatants in the Union Army, whose stories Skvorecky discovered in the Czech archives at the University of Chicago while researching his novel Dvorak in Love. The novel follows the soldiers as they campaign for General Sherman in the closing months of the war, but it reaches forward into the post-war years and backward into the soldiers' pasts in the United States and Europe. Skvorecky develops his characters in decidedly romantic terms: Sergeant Kapsa has fled to the United States in the wake of a catastrophic love affair with an Austrian officer's wife; Cyril Toupelik falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful slave from a neighbour's cotton plantation; while his sister Lida (the bride of the title) is buffeted by a series of doomed affairs in both Europe and America. These narratives are interspersed with the autobiographical writings of Lorraine Henderson Tracy, a popular novelist, protofeminist, and confidante of the much-maligned General Ambrose Burnside.
This is an enormous, complex, and meticulously plotted novel. Though not perfect--Skvorecky's few combat sequences are disappointingly vague, and his treatment of the Civil War may feel too idealistic to some--it is unique. The closely knit Czech combatants never quite assimilate into American culture, giving The Bride of Texas an outsider's perspective that allows it to sharply illuminate the cultural, sexual, and racial struggles of both Europe and America. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Toronto-based Czech writer Skvorecky's audacious, romantic, sprawling saga of Czech-Americans fighting and loving in the U.S. Civil War confirms his reputation as a risk-taking novelist. Here, as in Dvorak in Love and The Engineer of Human Souls, he skillfully melds sociopolitical insight, absurdist humor and tragedy. Skvorecky's new heroine, Moravian Lida Toupelik?her elopement squelched by a father who whips her?forsakes her Czech lover and migrates, pregnant and disgraced, to Texas, where she foolishly marries Etienne de Ribordeaux, the bourbon-drenched, aristocratic, one-legged son of a plantation owner. Lida's brother Cyril, a soldier (along with many other Czech-Americans) in General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march through the South, has a love affair with Dinah, a free-spirited slave whom Etienne had coerced into having sex years earlier. Around these hothouse parallel romances, which end tragically, Skvorecky re-creates the lives, adventures, homesickness and struggles of a disparate group of Czech-American soldiers who, far from their native land, which was then under Austrian despotism, fought for national unity and the liberation of the slaves. Most of the Czech-born soldiers and civilians portrayed?in Chicago, New York, Texas, Savannah?actually lived. Skvorecky inserts well-known historical figures as well, most prominently Sherman, whom the author sympathetically depicts as a patriot who scorched enemy land to shorten the war. Lincoln's hapless General Ambrose Burnside also appears, as does the peace-mongering, anti-abolitionist Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham, arrested by the U.S. Army as a traitor in 1863. Skvorecky's stunning novel shows us the Civil War, race relations, slavery and melting-pot America in a fresh and often startling light.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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