From Publishers Weekly
This collection of stories (which have previously appeared in an assortment of literary publications) tells of the Czech struggle for identity since the Velvet Revolution and of the expat Americans who have come as the "compassionate conqueror," bringing with them the American Dream. Set in Prague between December 1989 and the summer of 1993, the stories grapple with anti-German sentiment, adultery, anti-Semitism and emotional bankruptcy. Katrovas paints several nearly brilliant portraits of human pathos. In "Lincoln, Nebraska," the most heartbreaking of the tales, a Czech-American man, facing the onset of Alzheimer's, returns to his ancestral home, only to get literally lost in his childhood memories of prewar Prague. In another story, a solitary Czech bureaucrat who finds comfort in a "thorny bush [that] has been my point of reference and therefore my salvation," is frustrated by the obstinate superiority of an expat professor. The collection is uneven, though, and lacks gray tones. The Americans are caricatures--a macho marine, a precocious teen, a woman who has fled to Prague as an "expatriate of the heart." The Czechs possess "ironic heroism" and are a people for whom "passionate betrayal was deemed a body function," whose hatred of Germans is "a small but ugly canker on otherwise blemishless virtues." Faults notwithstanding, these are powerful dramas with very real, very poetic insights.
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
