Synopsis
The Czechoslovakian author of Love and Garbage explores the aftermath of his country's "Velvet Revolution" of 1989 through the character of a middle-aged cameraman who feels disoriented by the country's new liberties.
Reviews
This dark and powerful novel by Czech writer and former dissident Klima (Love and Garbage) follows the life of Pavel Fukova, a cynical cameraman for state-controlled TV in Czechoslovakia circa 1989. Pavel and his cineast buddy, Peter, attempted to flee the country 21 years ago. Since then, Pavel has sacrificed his dreams one by one on the altar of expediency. He thinks up screenplays for movies that will never be made and fantasizes about Alice, the lost love of his life. Every aspect of his life, in fact, is permeated by a moral grubbiness; to wit, he has a longstanding relationship with a woman whose former husband lives one thin wall away. Even the upheaval that unseats the president does nothing to relieve Pavel's lot, because he understands that neither the new powerbrokers nor he himself can forgive his cooperation with the previous regime. Lurking behind Pavel's sad story is Peter, who, after their failed escape attempt, gave up the possibility of a career in film and, in the process, won over Alice. Much of the plot is needlessly elliptical, but Klima's fine prose is as unsettling as his purpose. (The handful of scenes in an acrid explosives factory are so gloomy, they could have been written by Conrad.) Klima may, indeed, be reflecting the Velvet Revolution's darkening heart.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Having spent most of his life out of favor with his country's government, noted Czech author Klima (Judge on Trial, LJ 4/15/93) shows what it's like for everyone-dissident and nondissident alike-to come out on the other side of the revolution. His protagonist, Pavel, who was imprisoned in his youth for attempting to flee beyond the barbed wire to freedom, simply tries to get by working as the cameraman for a TV station. When the Velvet Revolution comes, he finds himself cast in the role of reactionary by the brave new youth of his country and by his friend Peter, with whom he attempted to escape. In the end, freedom is not as good as it looked: power shifts are meaningless, people scramble for economic gain, and a sense of confused uncertainty reigns. "I'm always trying to satisfy the people who make the decisions," concedes Pavel. In taut, uncluttered prose, Klima dispassionately examines the despair of people who have been trying to satisfy others for so long that they no longer know how to find a place for themselves in the world. Highly recommended for literate readers.
Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Klima's latest novel is his most ambitious, and it is about Pavel, a Czechoslovakian television cameraman accustomed to working within the confines of a totalitarian regime headed by a mentally incompetent, psychically mutilated president. Derided by his contemporaries for his capitulation to this system, haunted in midlife by the desire for a child by a lost lover, and burdened by his senile mother, he has longed throughout his career to make the documentary that would tell the uncensored truth about the darkness of his history. But after the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989 and the so-called collapse of Communism, he must act in a new age populated by citizens who as yet are painfully unaware of any limitations in their new "freedom," resembling Nietzsche's "new men," who can only blink, in Zarathustra. Pavel's documentary becomes indefinitely postponed, as does his hope for liberation from commercials, sound bites, and the greatest question of his flesh. Klima's book is both symphonic and cinematographic in form, and devastating in its refusal of faith. Klima, whose work was banned in his native Czechoslovakia until recently, is one of the most important literary voices of eastern Europe, on a par with Havel, Konrad, and Haraszti. Anyone remotely interested in the dislocations of history as well as the moral bankruptcy of the late-twentieth-century "information society" and its clampdown on conscience should read this book. Greg Burkman
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
