Customer Reviews

This Side of Reality: Modern Czech Short Stories (Modern Short Stories)

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The best story in this anthology by far is by the youngest author, "A Trip to the Raliway Station," by Jachym Topol. I recommend his novel "City Sister Silver." In Joycean, demotic, slangy, and debased registers, he manages in his story excerpted here to capture post-1989 Prague while avoiding the imitative Kafkaesque allegory that clogs so much of his earlier, pre-Glasnost compatriots' stories in this volume. Klima's "Tuesday Morning: A Sentimental Tale" from his superb "My Merry Mornings" collection and Skvorecky's droll "The Well-Screened Lizette" both highlight the intricacies of love and sexual politics in the Communist era. Ladislav Fuks' "Kchony Sees the World" and Arnost Lustig's "The River Where the Milky Way Flows" strive to examine the Shoah from an adolescent's oblique viewpoint; Ewald Muller's brief nightmare "Swallowed by Earth" in turn conveys the mood of partisans and refugees during the war forcefully. Ota Pavel's "Cafe Slavia" excerpt and Berkova's "Lousehead" excerpt manage less successfully but still ambitiously to capture some of the manic air of Stalinism and hero worship.

The other selections make me wonder if editors feel compelled to include all of their long-neglected authorial friends in these anthologies. When so many writers have admittedly suffered under totalitarianism and have been limited to samizdat clandestine exposure for decades, it sounds mean to begrudge them a wider audience. And many may not have had the luxury of being enriched by what Western readers could for forty years of the post-WW2 years. I don't mean to patronize, but the rest of the volume does not stand up to the selections I've noted. Topol's novel that followed this anthology, however, confirms him as the first major post-1989 figure in Czech fiction, and I hope that others will follow his formidable but dazzling path soon.