Search Results

“... oneself of evil and to atone for guilt conceals within it the risk of new crimes and new wrongs. Ivan Klima must have written that passage in about 1985. Judge on Trial was finished three years before the revolution of November 1989. But today the theme of those two paragraphs is at the centre of Czech and Slovak consciences. This is the moral crisis over ...”

“... sent him to the camps. Am I making heavy weather? It’s more than likely. Let me turn to Ivan Klima, who could be called a lyric author. The notion of what it is to be such an author is duly stretched in these gentle and deliberate stories, which read as if they have been grown and stored before being made public. The boy poet Klima loves ...”

“... that might naturally occur), by which moral or spiritual relations are typically set forth’. Klíma’s new novel fits the description exactly. There are three main characters, who take it in turns to tell the story and do a lot of thinking about ‘moral or spiritual relations’, each in his or her own voice and idiom. The central one is a ...”

“... of a profit-society in which everyone, even among the winners, ends up losing. The Czech novelist Ivan Klima’s 1972 novel A Summer Affair has yet to see the light of day in its country of origin. Not that we’re dealing in red-hot political exposé here: the novel is exactly what its title suggests, depicting a brief, intense and bitter affair between a ...”

“... Klima’s fine, disconsolate novel is scarcely the cliché its blurb makes it out – ‘a moving account of the fate of the dissident artist under an oppressive regime’ – because Klima’s reason for joining a team of Prague street-sweepers is not exactly that he has been forced to do it by the state. ‘I needed to go somewhere in the morning, at least I’d now have a natural objective for a while: set out somewhere, perform whatever kind of activity and listen to whatever kind of talk, just so I don’t have to sit amidst the silence listening to the snapping of threads ...”

“... away for further questioning, hopping a passing trolley for his getaway. When the police browbeat Ivan Klíma to discover what Roth was doing in Czechoslovakia, Klíma replied: ‘Don’t you read his books? He’s here for the girls.’Ah, yes, the girls. It keeps coming back to the girls. No matter how loftily we may ...”