Customer Reviews

Headed for the Blues: A Memoir

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Svorecky's book Headed for the Blues is an excellent, mainly stream-of-conciousness narrative dealing with his experiences as a young boy and man in his homeland. Woven in with this story of a Communist land is a philosophy on life and writing. An excellent book. One of my favorites. And believe me this review does NOT do it justice. I just figured a book as good as this ought to at least have one review here.

I was disappointed by Josef Skvorecky's Headed for the Blues. It is a very spotty and elliptical memoir, and presupposes familiarity with his first two novels (a familiarity I lack). The pained statement about failure (only dishonesty is culpable, not trying and falling short) are moving, but the book does little to explain how this writer came to be the writer he is. The angle of jazz as social protest that lacking words of dissidence is interesting, but there's not much more to say than stating it.

There's sex, another pastime for thwarted youth, and impotent outrage arbitrary exercises of state power in the set of related stories (stream-of-consciousness riffs) that don't IMHO add up to a novel. The author and his fictional alter ego are going somewhere (Canada, starging a Czech publishing company there, writing the formidable The Engineer of Human Souls), but the book and its protagonist mostly spin wheels.

While the synopsis of the book seems interesting, I am not sure what the book is about. The author uses a "stream of conscious" method of stroy telling which few authors could use successfully. Additionally, the story is not divided into chapters, so the stream of thought seems to speed to nowhere.

The book is allegedly a memoir of a Czech writer who moved to Canada to start a publishing company. The story is a reflection of his childhood and early life in communist Czechoslavakia. The few entertaining points are concentrated in the dark humor scattered throughout the book. The humor addresses such topics as prostitution and communism.

What was it like to live in communism? The answers to these questions are sparse and redundant. Aside from the humor, it is hard to decipher the author's objective. It is a memoir, but even memoir need a story that is going somewhere.