Volume 29, Number 14 · September 23, 1982
That Old Czech Magic
By Neal Ascherson
The Questionnaire, or Prayer for a Town and a Friend
by Jirí Grusa, translated by Peter Kussi
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pp., $15.95
Books written in Eastern Europe often have dramatic destinies. In that part of the world, life is more than usually inclined to imitate art: the writer who imagines a gulag may—to take the simplest example—find himself in a gulag. The scholar who points out the deformations of official history will soon read amazing versions of his own career, while the poet intrigued by the informer and the provocateur will probably be rewarded with more raw material than he would wish to absorb.
Review, 1781 words
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