Vaclav Havel
A Political Tragedy In Six Acts
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
This authorized biography of Havel, based on unrestricted access to him, his circle, and even his enemies, is not only the first definitive account of one of the modern world's great moral and political leaders but also a vivid panorama of the tumultuous events of his times. Havel's life, like that of his African counterpart Nelson Mandela, has been shaped and determined by the large political shifts of the twentieth century. Readers will taste the moments of joy, irony, farce, and misfortune through which he has lived, and realize that he has taught the world more about the powerful and the powerless, power-grabbing and power-sharing, than virtually anyone else on the world stage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a Communist-era dissident, successful playwright and leader of Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution and democratic government, Vaclav Havel is a timely and deserving subject for biography. Unfortunately, while Keane's authorized study fills some gaps, it is not the biography many have been waiting for. For those who seek the basic outline, this volume provides ample (though select) material on Havel's prominent prewar family, his marriages and numerous affairs, and his political and literary activities over the years. But this is, by no means, for the casual reader. It strives to be much more than an ordinary biography, and it doesn't succeed. Its major flaws are that, first, Keane takes an idiosyncratic approach to biography, insisting on viewing Havel as the emblematic 20th-century man, and second, that he has an awkward rhetorical style. Keane offers us the story of Havel's life not as a linear narrative but as a series of tableaux vivants "designed to heighten readers' sense that his actions in the world are understandable as a tragedy." The tragedy is that of a man who "suffered the misfortune of being born into the twentieth century... fate was politics." While to Keane, editor of a collection of Havel's writing and biographer of Tom Paine, this formulation is convincing, many readers will find it too restricting. This exaggerated conceit of writing about Havel as a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, which depends on inflated prose and frequent references to the role of fate, climaxes in a tasteless finale, a macabre rendering of the tragedy's end in Havel's (future) funeral.
