Amazon.ca
By turns hilarious, slyly wry, bittersweet, satirical, and chilling,
When Eve Was Naked charts the extraordinary life of Czech-Canadian author Josef Skvorecky. In lieu of a memoir, Skvorecky here has assembled fact-based stories (written over a 50-year period) that relate the trials and foibles of the human heart, set against the backdrop of some of the most dramatic and tragic events to which the 20th century has borne witness.
The title story, "Eve Was Naked," evokes the pre-war condition of innocence in Czechoslovakia as 7-year-old Danny Smiricky, the author's alter-ego narrator, falls in love for the first time during an outing at the beach. In "My Teacher, Mr. Katz," one of several grim stories set during World War II, the boy hides as he watches his Jewish-German instructor and neighbours being herded onto a train. Other stories conjure up an atmosphere of pranksterism, cruelty, and the sleepy eroticism of unattainable love during the post-war period of totalitarianism ushered in after the February 1948 Communist coup in put an end to President Benes's democratic regime. The final, delightfully satirical stories take place in the halls of Canadian academe, where Skvorecky landed after Czechoslovakia was invaded by the other Warsaw Pact nations in 1968.
Skvorecky's gift is his ability to register sensitively how historical processes profoundly impact individuals' destinies and their relationships with one another. In that respect alone (but not only in that), this journey through the life of a remarkable writer in an age of trauma is sure to satisfy long-time readers and intrigue newcomers to the author of such masterpieces as The Engineer of Human Souls, The Cowards, and Two Murders in My Double Life. --Diana Kuprel
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Just before Skvorecky turned 70, his friends urged him to write his memoirs. He decided instead to publish this collection of short stories, in which "nearly everything worth telling," as he writes in his preface, is present in one form or another. Taken together, the 24 tales work as both biography and history, tracking the literary life of one of the former Czechoslovakia's premier writers and the fate of his country under Nazi rule and Communist repression. The initial stories, which go by such self-explanatory titles as "How My Literary Career Began," "My Uncle Kohn" and "My Teacher, Mr. Katz," offer brief snapshots of the author's early years, and the specter of Nazism constantly hovers in the background as various characters are spirited away to the concentration camps. The most effective items in the collections are the longer, mid-career entries: "The End of Bull M cha" is an unusual look at political repression, in which a former jazz musician is thrown out of a club for his outrageous jitterbug dancing, while "Spectator on a February Night" tracks the chaos that occurs when Prague's left-wing journalists are forced to leave the country during the 1968 student demonstrations. The romantically oriented stories are a bit muddled by comparison, and a couple of the late-career stories that revolve around Skvorecky's teaching career are pedantic and ineffective. Skvorecky displays the tongue-in-cheek irony that is common to many Eastern European writers, but his unique compassion, humanism and wisdom in the face of relentless, unspeakable political horror makes him consistently engaging and intriguing. This collection should serve as both a summary and a point of entry for readers who wish to explore the shorter works of one of the finest international writers of his generation.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
