Customer Reviews

The Engineer of Human Souls

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Skvorecky has written a multi-layered and highly readable story centering around the coming of age of his fictional alter ego, Danny Smiricky. The plot interweaves the youthful Danny chasing girls and dealing with Nazi occupation with the adult Danny's encounters in the Canadian Czech expatriate community, teaching literature in university to students the age he was during the war. The authors and novels the adult Danny teaches provide a framework for the book as a whole, and this structure gives the story a depth and resonance a simpler narrative might lack. As always, Skvorecky is a hilarious and moving story teller as well.

I first read "Engineer of Human Souls" in 1984. Every few years I start to miss Danny and Nadia, and then I know it's time to re-read it. Sometimes I jump into the story again partway through. Every time the characters seem a little different, as my own life experiences change my understanding of them.

One of Skvorecky's universal themes in this novel is how one can live as an exile, a theme Shakespeare also used (The Tempest, The Winter's Tale). Aren't we all exiles in some sense, from our parents' home, from our childhood playmates, from a hometown somewhere? Another theme is how a person should resist against the wrongs of a government (Nazis, Communists). There is plenty in this book to make the reader laugh, cry, and think.

If you want to understand the complexities of Eastern-Mittle European reality post-WWII and if you want to understand the life of Comunist era refugees in Western countries, read this book! Better than the anti-comunist livor of Solgenitsyin, funny, compassionate and true.

This novel written before the Velvet Revolution that finally toppled the Communists from Czechoslovakia, swings back and forth in time from the days of Nazi occupation during World War II, to the early 1980s. We follow the life of Danny, a writer exiled to a sterile academic life in Canada, from his teenage days to his mid-fifties.

The action moves around in time kaleidoscopically through letters from friends spread around the world, vignettes, scenes from the past and present and the musings of the protagonist who lives mostly in his memories. The book is often comic in a Mittel-Europa kind of way -- which means you're not sure whether you're supposed to laugh or cry.

The novel's greatest strength is the way it captures the futile life of the exile. The Czech community in Toronto comprises exiles who fled fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s, those who escaped Communism in the 1940s and 1950s and the ones who got out after the Prague Spring of 1968. These different groups, with their petty, inbred concerns, their endless homesickness and longing, are a template for the dilemma of all political exiles.

There are also heartbreaking scenes -- the death of Danny's first lover of tuberculosis, the suffering of his Jewish friend who survives Auschwitz and reaches Israel only to lose her son and grandchild in a terrorist attack.

My main problem is the book is simply too long. I began to tire of it -- and thought the author was beginning to repeat himself quite a way before the end. He evidently threw his heart and soul into it and much of it is loosely autobiographic no doubt. It remains a valuable document from a lost time.

Better than Milan Kundera, this is a great novel. It may seem a little dated, as we are all tired of the alienated college professor rap(they write what they know). However the journey back to the war really are moving, and I do reccomend this book.

Quite an amazing book. I picked it up after seeing it on a book list of top influential books in Prague. I guess it is popular in its original Czech language. The main character being a Canadian from the then communist, totalitarian regime - was quite an experience for myself, and gave me some insight on how the other half lived ... the fact was like a fairy tale, and the fiction was such truth.

As brief as can be: this novel demonstrates how some live in history and some observe it. The contrast between the North American portions, where history happens 'out there', and the remainder of the book are striking and affecting. I shed tears while in this book, beware, it is real in the poet's way.

I read one of the author's other works, "The Miracle Game" and enjoyed it. This book, however, is inferior to it in every way. The author is not able to handle length of this project. Characters enter and leave the narrative without much explanation, and it becomes almost impossible to keep track of them. Stylistically, this is not his best work. The writing is not as tight (this could be the fault of the translation, I'm not sure).

He has an interesting idea: structure the narrative around famous American writers. Its not entirely original but could be very fun and revealing. He fails with this idea. He hardly works these writers into the narrative, and it becomes hardly more than a prop.

If you want to read his work, I'd recommend "The Miracle Game."