A01=Ludvik Vaculik
A19=Jonathan Bolton
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Ludvik Vaculik
automatic-update
B06=Gerald Turner
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DNJ
Category=DNP
COP=Czechia
Czech Republic
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
SN=Modern Czech Classics
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9788024638522
- Dimensions: 127 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2018
- Publisher: Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic
- Publication City/Country: CZ
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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It’s 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiří Kolář, Vaculík begins to keep a diary, “a book about things, people, and events.” This marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook.
Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction—an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculík himself described as an amalgam of “hard-boiled documentary” and “magic fiction,” while Václav Havel called it “a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity.”
A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculík’s masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony—an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.
