This sounds a really engaging and thought provoking read at a time where authoritarianism is attempting to threaten what were regarded as traditional democracies.
I haven’t read much Czech literature, only the usual Kafkas and Josef Skvorecky’s The Cowards (see my review) so I turned to Michael (The Complete Review) Orthofer’s Guide to Contemporary World Fiction (2016) for some guidance in interpreting Jiří Kratochvil’s The Vow: A Requiem for The Fifties (published in Czech as Slib in 2009). Alas, Jiří Kratochvil (b.1940) doesn’t get a mention and this is probably because The Vow is the first of his books to be translated into English, and it’s taken until 2021 for that to happen…
As you can see from his page at Goodreads, and his Wikipedia page Kratochvil is a prolific Czech writer. In 1991 he was awarded the Tom Stoppard Prize for his book Medvědí román (“A Bear’s Novel”) and in 1999 he was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize.
The Vow is a very interesting book, but it’s challenging. Set…
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