My Crazy Century

August 19, 2013
Acclaimed dissident Czech playwright and novelist Klíma (Love and Garbage) surveys several varieties of political insanity in this absorbing memoir. His life began in deranged horror as his Jewish family barely survived internment in the “model” Nazi concentration camp in the Czech city of Terezín; after the war, he grew disillusioned with the irrationality of the new Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, especially when his father, an ardent Communist, was arrested on trumped-up accusations of sabotage. Most of his narrative takes place during Czechoslovakia’s post-Stalinist “weary dictatorship.” Klíma, then a prominent editor, wrestled with censors and adapted to the idiocies of official literary ideology. After the Prague Spring in 1968, his books were banned and his life became a labyrinth of police harassment and cat-and-mouse games with government interrogators who barely pretended to believe their own prosecutorial gambits, while a seemingly futile samizdat movement simmered underground. The author relates all this with a mordant humor and a limpid prose that registers both the overt fear that repression engenders and the subtler moral corruptions it works in victims and perpetrators. He finishes with a series of penetrating essays on the underpinnings of totalitarianism, from its utopian fantasies to its sordid practical compromises. Klíma’s searching exploration of a warped era is rich in irony—and dogged hope.

November 1, 2013
From the Nazi concentration camps to the communist show trials, Klima (No Saints or Angels, 2001, etc.) shines a vibrant light on the machinery of oppression and the struggles of artists and intellectuals to subvert government control. For decades, the author was one of Czechoslovakia's most prolific and influential writers of samizdat, but he has never told his own story in such detail. After miraculously surviving Theresienstadt, he enthusiastically joined the Communist Party ("It was as if the walls of the fortress where I had been forced to spend part of my childhood had hindered me from seeing the world in its true colors") and decided to pursue writing. The travails of his father, an engineer prosecuted for running a factory that failed to meet its production quota, and the growing sense of paranoia in the literary and publishing communities in which he was beginning to establish himself gradually opened his eyes to the futility of communism, "a nefarious confederacy that in the name of grand objectives stole the property of society and destroyed what it had taken generations to create." More than a memoir, the book is the intellectual history of a city and a memorial to its inhabitants, who, laboring underground, kept the idea of democracy alive after the Prague Spring. Encompassing all the major journals, movements and personalities who shaped Prague's cultural and artistic life in the latter half of the 20th century, the author also touches on some of the themes--tension with Slovakia, postwar depopulation and stagnation of the countryside, the ongoing struggle to integrate gypsies and other minorities--that continue to shape the Czech Republic's identity. A fitting capstone to a distinguished literary life and an exposition of one of the main flaws of communism--that "the betrayal of intelligence leads to the barbarization of everyone."

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October 1, 2013
Kl-ma was seven in 1941, when his family was taken with other Jews living in Prague to the Terezin concentration camp. Because of happenstance and possibly because his father was an electrician and particularly useful, the family survived, only to fall under the tyranny of communism. He found some pleasure in writing essays in an impromptu school in the camps and later drifted into journalism, learning the severe limitations of truth telling as he adjusted to the expectation of glorious reports of progress. Kl-ma traces his personal journey through belief in communism that he shared with his generation, an appeal having more to do with the search for high ideals than the actual ideology, and a growing disillusionment after his father's arrest and trial. All through the postwar spread of communism, the liberation of the Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion, and the eventual collapse of the Communist regime, Kl-ma grew as a writer and a human being, joining other writers in the revolt against oppression. A sweeping, revealing look at one man's personal struggle as writer and individual, set against the backdrop of political turmoil.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2013

If this were simply the autobiography of a world-class writer, that would be enough. But, more tellingly, it's the autobiography of a man who suffered under two totalitarian regimes: as a child, Klima spent four years in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp outside Prague, and thereafter he lived under communist rule in Czechoslovakia, banned from publication for 20 years.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2013

In his first autobiography, Franz Kafka Prize winner and acclaimed Czech novelist and playwright Klima (Waiting for the Dark; Lovers for a Day) depicts the brutality and anguish he and his countrymen suffered under the Nazis and then under the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. Klima focuses on both the personal and professional battles he faced from an oppressive government and traces his life from survival of the Terezin concentration camp in Prague to joining the Communist Party as a young man to his eventual expulsion from the party and the banishment of his books. Beyond his portrayal of the terrible conditions in which he lived, he also provides an illuminating portrait of a writer struggling to perfect his craft. Interspersed within the narrative are excerpts from essays by Klima on politics, government, and ideologies. VERDICT While fans of the author and those seeking Eastern Europe during the Cold War will find this account of particular interest, it is also essential for all readers with an interest in accessible and emotionally affecting memoirs. [See Prepub Alert, 5/20/13.]--Ben Neal, Sullivan Cty. P.L., Bristol, TN

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.