My Crazy Century
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An intimate, politically vital memoir by the acclaimed Czech author "of enormous power and originality" explores his life under Nazi and Communist regimes (The New York Times Book Review).
In the 1930s on the outskirts of Prague, Ivan Klíma was unaware of his concealed Jewish heritage until the invading Nazis transported him and his family to the Terezín concentration camp. Miraculously, most of them survived. But they returned home to a city that was falling into the grip of another totalitarian ideology: Communism.
Along this harrowing journey, Klíma discovered his love of literature and matured as a writer. But as the regime further encroached on daily life, arresting his father and censoring his work, Klíma recognized the party for what it was: a deplorable, colossal lie. The true nature of oppression became clear to him and many of his peers, among them Josef Škvorecký, Milan Kundera, and Václav Havel. From the brief hope of freedom during the Prague Spring of 1968 to Charter 77 and the eventual collapse of the regime in 1989's Velvet Revolution, Klíma's revelatory account provides a profoundly rich personal and national history.
Klima's memoir provides "a sweeping, revealing look at one man's personal struggle as writer and individual, set against the backdrop of political turmoil" (Booklist) and a "searching exploration of a warped era . . . rich in irony—and dogged hope." (Publishers Weekly).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Acclaimed dissident Czech playwright and novelist Kl ma (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 Terez n; 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." Kl ma, 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. Kl ma's searching exploration of a warped era is rich in irony and dogged hope.
