Volume 15, Number 9 · November 19, 1970
Heretics
By Neal Ascherson
The Cowards
by Josef Skvorecký, translated by Jeanne Nemcová
Grove, 416 pp., $7.95
Joseph
by Mervyn Jones
Atheneum, 506 pp., $7.95
Little Peter in War and Peace
by Gerhard Zwerenz, translated by William Whitman
Grove, 339 pp., $6.95
The Public Prosecutor
by Georgi Dzhagarov, adapted from the Bulgarian by C.P. Snow, by Pamela Hansford Johnson, Introduction by C.P. Snow
University of Washington, 112 pp., $4.95
The appearance of The Cowards in English is the latest episode in the life of what must be one of Europe's longest-suffering manuscripts. Josef Skvorecký originally wrote this book in Czechoslovakia in 1948-9, when he was only twenty-four. It did not get published. Ten years later he submitted the manuscript of another novel, End of the Nylon Age, which was rejected by the Novotny literary bureaucracy. Irritated, Skvorecký dug out The Cowards again—an enormous bundle of some 800 pages—carved a large novel out of it, and tried that on the authorities.
Review, 1943 words
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