The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays [Paperback]

Ivan Klima (Author), Paul Wilson (Author, Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

A collection of essays by an eminent Czechoslovakian novelist explores the turbulent history of Prague over the past fifty years, the author's childhood experience in a concentration camp, the work of Franz Kafka, and the meaning of hope. Original. IP.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of critical pieces by the acclaimed Czech author of Waiting for the Darkness, Waiting for the Light offers a fine introduction to Klima's life, intellectual development and literary and cultural preoccupations. It includes essays on the author's boyhood, partly spent in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin; on his beginnings as a writer; and an interview with Philip Roth in which Klima expresses his views on Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera, among other people and topics. There is also an essay on the creation of Prague's samizdat press and some rather cranky feuilletons, short pieces written for same. But the longer the essays, the more powerful. Klima's description of the genesis of organized opposition to the Czech Communist government after 1968 and his long closing work, delineating the role that certain painful personal experiences played in Kafka's writing, especially of The Castle and In the Penal Colony, are particularly important. While exposing readers to Klima, this well-constructed collection will also help acquaint them with contemporary Czech letters, and with the circumstances surrounding the non-violent "velvet" revolution of 1989, one of recent history's most inspired episodes of intellectual activism and courage.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In an interview with Philip Roth that is the best piece in this intriguing but somewhat mixed bag of essays, Klima comments of famed Czech emigre Kundera, "The hardness of life has a much more complicated shape than we find in his presentation of it." The contrast couldn't be greater with Klima's own writings (e.g., Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, LJ 2/15/95), which with sympathy and deep humanity work through the painful moral dilemmas and daily little compromises people make under totalitarian rule. In two modestly titled pieces that open the book, "A Rather Unconventional Childhood" and "How I Began," Klima discusses a youth spent in a Nazi concentration camp (he is Jewish) and then under Communist rule and shows how this shaped his writing impulse. These pieces are Klima at his best?subtle, effectively detailed, capable of standing to the side of events and extracting their essence. Other pieces here, many given as addresses at various symposia, are too brief to be involving. Nevertheless, this collection offers valuable insight into Klima's work, which should be read by anyone interested in good literature or world events. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Granta Books (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964561123
• ISBN-13: 978-0964561120
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,480,113 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrific and insightful collection of essays., October 6, 2000

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Stephen J. Ziegler (Tashkent, Uzbekistan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (Paperback)

This wonderful short work by prominent Czech author Ivan Klima could do much to provide insights and understanding into the heart of Prague: the Czech people-- their history, what they've seen and who they've become. If you haven't read any Klima, this collection of essays is a fine place to start.

Essay, A Rather Unconventional Childhood: "...I remember every detail of the day when I stood by the razed prison fence, which I had once understood I would never be allowed to cross, and watched as endless columns of Red Army soldiers, tired horses, exhausted people, dirty tanks, cars and cannon, all filed by, and for the first time I saw a portrait of Marshal Stalin, a man whose face I long afterwards associated with that moment, and I sobbed uncontrollably at the knowledge that I was free. As I watched, a German civilian was beaten to death, and a tank ran over a prisoner who too greedily flung himself on a pack of cigarettes someone had tossed on the ground, but none of this could spoil my mood..."

Essay, The Powerful and the Powerless: "The strength of the powerful never (or almost never) derives from some higher mandate, or from spiritual values, or because they had a corner on truth or wisdom, though the powerful may have tried to claim this. It comes only from a preponderance of strength. The strength is then generally based on the number of souls dominated, on the power of their weapons and on their ability to organize...

The author explores literature, journalism and trends among other things. But it is not a textbook. It is pure art.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Spirit of Prague, The Soul of Klima, August 16, 2004

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Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (Paperback)

Ivan Klima has written novels, short stories, and essays. I have read much of Klima and discovered them in that order. I wish I had discovered his essays, particularly those found in the Spirit of Prague, first. This is not because Klima's novels and short stories are not consistently excellent. They are. However, these essays are so well written and so laden with Klima's own views on his life and thought processes that reading them can only enrich the enjoyment one gets from his fiction. To the extent that a writer's life must inform his writing, our window into that writer's life informs our understanding of his work.
The Spirit of Prague consists of a series of essays or speeches written by Klima over the years. Many of these essays were written in samizdat form during the years in which Klima's work was not published by the Czech communist regimes. It also includes the transcript of an interview between Klima and the author Phillip Roth that was originally published in the New York Review of Books in 1990.
The first essay, A Rather Unconventional Childhood details Klima's childhood years in a Nazi concentration camp. As one might expect such a childhood left an indelible mark on Klima's world view. One lesson learned was a simple one, "that few things are harder to restore than lost honour". In describing his life under the Nazis and then the Czech communist regime Klima avers that and society founded on dishonesty "while depriving another group, no matter how small, of its honour and even its right to life, condemns itself to moral degeneration and, ultimately, to complete collapse." This world view colors Klima's fiction and is evident in his novels, such as Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light and in his short stories (My Golden Trades and My Merry Mornings). It also colored his response to living under the old regime and the honourable choices he made to return to Prague from London after the tanks rolled in 1968 and on his refusal to make compromises with the regime that would have allowed him to publish his work.
In his essay, Literature and Memory, Klima addresses the oft-asked question, why does someone write? Drawing on Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Klima asserts that if "we lose our memory, we lose ourselves." For Klima, a truly literary work is, in essence, a protest against the forgetting that looms over him.
The Phillip Roth interview of Klima was marred to a degree by Roth's perceived need to establish his own bona fides as a member of the intelligentsia at the expense of drawing more out of Klima. Nevertheless, it had a fascinatingly exchange in which Klima provides a glimpse into the forces that propelled the writer and dissident V. Havel into the Presidency of the Czech Republic.
The Powerful and the Powerless, written in 1980, is an extraordinary piece that pretty much summarizes what Klima's life bears stark witness to; the struggle between the powerful and the powerless. It is at once moving and pessimistic as Klima asserts that "humanity will not be redeemed by power wielded by the formerly powerless, for their innocence will be lost the day they become powerful." The goal of the powerful is to use their strength to put any potential rebels back in that special place where "emptiness [and]fear reigns."
The Spirit of Prague concludes with a brilliant, short essay on the life and work of Franz Kafka: The Swords are Approaching. Anyone interested in Kafka and his life and work would be well advised to pick up this collection of essays.
The above summary does not really do justice to the quality and spirit of Klima's writing. Similarly, it does not do justice to the portrait gives us of his life and the life of his country. The Spirit of Prague is a fascinating piece of work.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Spirit of Prague? -- Well certainly the flavor of Prague, August 7, 2005

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David Starr-Glass (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (Paperback)

Many regard Ivan Klima as a significant voice in contemporary Czech literature. Unfortunately this short collection of, in many case, very short essays only suggests rather than confirms his literary presence. His reflection on a childhood spent under German occupation in the 1940s, which ended in his deportation to the Terezin extermination camp, is compelling and compassionate and gives a valuable insight into the man and his approach to writing.

In other pieces Klima confronts issues of identity, in particular his own place within totalitarian systems, fascist and Stalinist. His writing is clear, insightful, lean, and resilient. It is a voice of integrity and honesty in a obdurate world, rather than a self-conscious articulation of protest or resistance.

The problem with the book lies in the selection of content. Many of the pieces are speeches given on various occasions, where the occasion forces the topic and context is not available. A particularly insightful piece is not so much an interview with Philip Roth as a dialogue between these very different writers and social critics.

While the essays do not show the best of Klima they do provide a possible starting place for someone new to his writing.