The Engineer Of Human Souls: An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life,Women,Fate,Dreams,the Working Class, Secret Agents,Love and Death - Softcover

Skvorecky, Josef

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099386410 ISBN 13: 9780099386414

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 1994

Synopsis

THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS spins its own story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. yet what emerges is comedy - clack, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly middle European as the despairing wit of prague's own Franz Kafka' Time

About this title

Review:

A deep pleasure to read.

Starred Review.This powerful, moving, yet often hilarious novel is an example of cultural meditation at its best.

Skvorecky is so much of a writer that the moment he puts pen to paper, he can't help being an artist.

What better check on general doctrine than the poet's and the novelist's 'small stories, ' the kind that Josef Skvorecky recounts with such verve and generosity.

A complex, challenging analysis of contemporary politics and society, The Engineer of Human Souls will become a milestone in the evolution of world literature.

Josef Skvorecky is unquestionably an important writer, blending a great humorous talent with a restless, sustained, probing moral inquisitiveness . . . The Engineer of Human Souls will certainly introduce the reader to the distinctive Skvorecky world.

[Skvorecky is] one of the major literary figures of our time . . . a novelist of the first rank . . . one of the masters of current Czech literature . . . His novels are sad, funny--and utterly gripping.

By turns comic or sad and bitter, Skvorecky's book is a marvelous exploration of the human condition.

Among its many other virtues, The Engineer of Human Souls is perhaps the funniest academic novel since Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man.

Starred Review. This powerful, moving, yet often hilarious novel is an example of cultural meditation at its best.

Synopsis:

A black comedy by the author of "The Swell Season", which traced the libidinous ardours of the young Danny in wartime Czechoslovakia. Danny, now exiled from his country, is a professor in Canada - a kind of intellectual Schweik, although far less ruthless than a good-natured sergeant.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0099386410
• ISBN 13: 9780099386414
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592