The Good Soldier vejk and his Fortunes in the World War - Softcover

Jaroslav Ha ek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140449914 ISBN 13: 9780140449914

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2005

Synopsis

The inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Jaroslav Hašek's black satire The Good Soldier Švejk is translated with an introduction by Cecil Parrott in Penguin Classics.

Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards, getting drunk and becoming a general nuisance, the resourceful Švejk uses all his natural cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the doctors, police, clergy and officers who chivvy him towards battle. The story of a 'little man' caught in a vast bureaucratic machine, The Good Soldier Švejk combines dazzling wordplay and piercing satire to create a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war.

Cecil Parrott's vibrant, unabridged and unbowdlerized translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing Hašek's turbulent life as an anarchist, communist and vagranty, and the Everyman character of Švejk. This edition also includes a guide to Czech names, maps and original illustrations by Josef Ladas.

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923) Besides this book, the writer wrote more than 2,000 short works, short stories, glosses, sketches, mostly under various pen-names.

If you enjoyed The Good Soldier Švejk, you might like Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, also available in Penguin Classics.

'Brilliant ... perhaps the funniest novel ever written'
George Monbiot

'Hašek was a comic genius'
Sunday Times

'Hašek was a humorist of the highest calibre....A later age will perhaps put him on a level with Cervantes and Rabelais'
Max Brod

About this title

Review:

"Without Svejk, Joseph Heller has said, there would have been no Catch-22."--The Guardian

"One of the greatest works of 20th century literature."--Boston Globe

"Hasek was a comic genius."--Sunday Times (London)

"Rich and ranging, endlessly inventive. ... The predicaments of Svejk in an absurd world still continue. And the laughter echoes."--Los Angeles Times

"[Svejk] is one of the great characters of 20th-century literature. ... [Hasek] captures the flavor of life in early-century Prague. ... Hasek's honesty, clarity of detail, and pawky restraint have made The Good Soldier Svejk a near classic."--New Republic

"All the good adjectives apply to [this novel]: robust, bawdy, sly, hugely comic and astonishingly inventive; it is also singularly undemanding on its readers. ... A very funny novel and a wise one."--Newsweek

"Brilliant. ... Perhaps the funniest novel ever written."--George Monbiot

"Anyone in power, including the president would benefit from Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk. ... First because it would make them laugh, and then because it is the best antiwar novel I know."--Colm Toibin

"Continues to have an astonishing afterlife. ... Commonly cited as an ancestor of Joseph Heller's Catch-22... [its] continued resonance suggests how deep a nerve Hasek touched. His comic hero highlights the illogic of war so brilliantly that Svejk's character has been absorbed into Western culture."--New York Times

"[A] comic masterpiece."--Telegraph (UK)

From the Back Cover:

The eponymous hero of The Good Soldier Svjek-the book for which the Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek will forever be remembered-has virtually come to define, since his creation in the aftermath of World War I, the spirit of comic endurance necessary to withstand the manglings of a modern-day bureaucratic war machine. Shrewd, affable, possessed of an unerring talent for finding himself in (and extricating himself from) the most fitfully chaotic and absurd situations, Svejk represents, in his instinct for survival, all those human values which stand opposed to the utter futility of warfare.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0140449914
• ISBN 13: 9780140449914
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 784
• Illustrator: Josef Lada