First printing. Translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers. A collection of four stories. The author was one of Czechoslovakia s most prolific and influential writers of samizdat, surviving Theresienstadt, and the Communist Party dictatorship.

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Bibliographic Details

Title

My First Loves

Publisher

Harper & Row, New York

Publication Date

1988

Language

English

ISBN 10

0060158662

ISBN 13

9780060158668

Binding

Hardcover

Edition

First American edition.

Condition

Very Good +

Dust Jacket Condition

very good +

Seller catalogs

Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Four short stories explore the emotional development of a young man in postwar Czechoslovakia

Reviews

This elegiac and lyrical coming-of-age quartet of stories on love, obsession and disenchantment follows one protagonist from a WW II boyhood in a Czech ghetto to life as a student and aspiring writer under the Communist regime. Klima (A Ship Named Hope), whose works are banned in his native Czechoslovakia, weds the theme of doomed love to that of perfidious politics. The title character of "Miriam" demonstrates devotion to the narrator by offering him a special ration of milk in the ghetto. When she is no longer infatuated, he learns that "it was better to suffer and be loved than to be joyous without love." The lesson applies as well to his cousin, who at the story's close has been deported to a concentration camp with her new husband. In "My Country" the atrocities of the recent war are pondered and the glories and hazards of a newfound communism are weighed. The introspective narrator learns that an older woman "could yearn for me and make love to another and weep for another, yet. . . life was like that." Most memorable is "The Truth Game," where the protagonist suffers a double loss of innocence: he discovers both the treacheries of his first lover, a capricious, compulsive but charming liar, and of a despotic, charismatic Czech Communist leader. A singular, digressive voice and keen, sensuous imagery imbue these tales with an intoxicating power.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Great Northern Books
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