Is there a dissident or writer who lived under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia who wasn't a music aficionado? The blues are in the title of novelist Skvorecky's memoir, but it's jazz that gives the book its improvisatory form and its subtext: jazz as a form of inarticulate protest against the overwhelming power of the state. Skvorecky was born in Kostelec in the 1920s, an idyllic time and place from the vantage point of Czechoslovakia's turbulent subsequent history. Skvorecky skips over the map and across the decades to provide this headlong history of his life and times, a history as jumbled and feverish as a sax player's after-midnight solo. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This short, hallucinatory memoir by Czech novelist Svorecky (The Bride of Texas), who emigrated to Canada in 1968, is a nonstop, free-associative outpouring, as daring and experimental as his novels. He reminisces on his political and sexual awakening, his youth in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, the arbitrary arrests of friends and fellow activists after the Communists grabbed totalitarian power in 1949 and his artistic revolt against "wall-to-wall Czech socialist realism." The tone is feverish, bitterly sardonic, in a narrative peppered with anecdotes, asides, witticisms, memory shards and topical allusions (many skillfully explicated in the translator's notes). Writing nostalgically of his love of jazz and of resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1968 Prague Spring, Svorecky also offers random, often irreverent comments on Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kundera, Hemingway, Karel Capek.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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