From Publishers Weekly
This short, hallucinatory memoir by Czech novelist Svorecky (The Bride of Texas), who emigrated to Canada in 1968, is a nonstop, free-associative outpouring, as daring and experimental as his novels. He reminisces on his political and sexual awakening, his youth in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, the arbitrary arrests of friends and fellow activists after the Communists grabbed totalitarian power in 1949 and his artistic revolt against "wall-to-wall Czech socialist realism." The tone is feverish, bitterly sardonic, in a narrative peppered with anecdotes, asides, witticisms, memory shards and topical allusions (many skillfully explicated in the translator's notes). Writing nostalgically of his love of jazz and of resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1968 Prague Spring, Svorecky also offers random, often irreverent comments on Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kundera, Hemingway, Karel Capek.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
In this brief volume, noted Czech novelist Skvorecky looks back at a youth spent under Communist rule, but don't expect anything so dull as a straightforward recounting of facts. Instead, Skvorecky offers terse, impressionistic snatches of fact told in an inimitably slangy and witty style. Free-associating wildly, with events bouncing about like light glancing off a plate of glass, he records memories of the war, its aftermath, and the sense of growing repression in a land where fizls (informers) abound and all the rules have been changed. Yet the personal enters too: there's young love (or lust) and Skvorecky's growing passion for jazz, which has defined his life and his writing. Political and literary allusions that will go right past American readers pepper the text, but fortunately a fine section of notes is included at the end of the book. Skrorecky has written a little gem of a memoir that flows wonderfully, and though the language requires a little concentration, anyone who perseveres will be amply rewarded. For all literary collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
