Search Results

“... what you see is all you get. Christoph Ransmayr has been blessed with a sympathetic translator, Josef Skvorecky cursed with an inadequate one whose name, perhaps by merciful intention, has been left off the title page. Skvorecky’s Lieutenant Boruvka is something like a Czech counterpart of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s ...”

“... looking for quotes for books they were about to publish. Authors wrote. In 1973 Greene wrote to Josef Skvorecky: ‘Your letters reach the length of a book by this time ... I feel sad that you are wasting such good material on me, but if you ever come to write about these events I can always send you the letters back.’ He did not, in general, waste ...”

“... Josef Skvorecky left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and is now Professor of English at Erindale College in Canada. His new novel is about a Czech called Danny Smiricky who also emigrated to Canada in 1968 and who has become Professor of American Literature at Edenvale College. The invented name, ‘Edenvale’, illustrates Smiricky’s mixed feelings about his academic life in Canada: it might seem idyllic, paradisal, to a Czech who spent his youth under the Nazis and then the Communists, but he often catches himself thinking that his students and fellow teachers are too innocent, like Adam before the Fall, too naive, too credulous ...”

“... Around the figure of the battered baby the rest of Roger’s Version falls into place. As I read Josef Skvorecky’s new novel, it occurred to me that, however else one might characterise Roger Lambert’s version of the world, nothing would be more appropriate than to say of it, adapting Berryman, that it was ‘horribly unlike Dvořák’. For, like ...”

“... is more real than life itself.’ Broadly in the vein of works by Eastern Bloc dissidents like Josef Skvorecky and Vladimir Voinovich, it tells of a man who’s found success as a professional blood donor and a three-legged dog that sententiously lectures humans on their bestial behaviour, among other absurd figures. Because its arguments tend to be ...”

“... men, Czechoslovakia is both painful and blissful. It is not surprising that the Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky should be keen on My First Loves. Skvorecky left his country to teach in North America – as did the Dubcekite Klima – and has improved the shining hours of a Canadian exile. But Klima has gone back. It ...”

“... for publication. Instead, he read them aloud to the group’s members (who included the novelist Josef Skvorecky). The tale is told – it is rather like those ‘symbolic’ stories about rulers that were collected by Tacitus and Plutarch – that one day Hrabal overheard Kolar, who was selling dolls at the time, being asked: ‘Kolar, do you have ...”

“... of everything in a society where freedom of expression is anything but compressed.The Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who now lives in Toronto, has said: ‘To be a bad writer in Eastern Europe, you really have to be bad.’ He means that in those countries the political origins of their suffering are plainly visible in everyday life and the predicament is ...”

“... appeared in censored versions, others were smuggled out to émigré publishers abroad (notably, to Josef Škvorecký’s 68 Publishers in Toronto). Now they have come full-circle, and many of them are published by English-language publishers in Prague. It’s hard to think of another writer so unconventionally formed, so rebelliously syncopated, so ...”

“... a cor anglais is singing above muted strings. This tender melody reminds me of a mawkish novel by Josef Skvorecky. The details elude me, but I fancy Dvořák in Love to have been a soft-focus, rural idyll, and I fall to imagining a red sun rising behind a field of gently rippling Bohemian corn, and, beyond it, a girl in a dirndl beckoning ...”

“... write, says Novak. The points made in this terse, deft and witty story will remind some readers of Josef Skvorecky’s long, complicated novel, The Engineer of Human Souls. The time-serving Novak Senior is like Lojza in Skvorecky’s book and Olga, eager to get to the States through marriage, is like ...”

“... makes everything else possible. Kundera started out as a Czech humourist of the leaner sort (not a Skvorecky, not a bonhomous Hrabal), and the contradictory economics of the joker – the cut-to-the-chase of the set-up, the delay of digressiveness – have stayed with him. You slow down from time to time, but always on his terms; generally, the pace is ...”