Lovers for a Day

Klima, Ivan

ISBN 10: 0802116515 / ISBN 13: 9780802116512

Published by Grove Pr, 1999

About this Item

Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00083277226

Bibliographic Details

Title: Lovers for a Day

Publisher: Grove Pr

Publication Date: 1999

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis:

Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by Booklist as "one of the most important literary voices of Eastern Europe, on a par with Havel, Konrad, and Haraszti." His novels Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light and The Ultimate Intimacy have established him as a writer with a uniquely wry perspective on human affection.In Lovers for a Day, he delivers a beautiful and masterfully crafted collection of short stories on the theme of love. In "Heaven Hell Paradise, " a doctor who has escaped to London comes back to communist Czechoslovakia to be with his lover and realizes too late that he barely knows her. And in "A Baffling Choice, " a young woman begins an affair with an older man who lives in her apartment building, right under the nose of his wife. The dreams and frustrations of the student cafeteria and the turmoil of political exile in the early 1960s evolve into portraits of people struggling with responsibility, fidelity, and absence, haunted by a terrible guilt when their desires begin to become reality. Klima's unique wisdom creates a personal political history of Prague that is an acute and moving examination of our attempts to find freedom in love.

Review:

This volume of short stories by Czech writer Ivan Klíma (whose works were banned in his home country until recently) brings together material from the 60s and texts from the late 80s and 90s. Lovers for A Day is a book that traces the continuities of disenchantments and frustrations, of misunderstandings and fragile amorous hopes, over several decades of Czech life. Where the earlier pieces, with their explorations of private lives under a barely mentioned but ever present communism, show people who are warped by their circumstances--to the extent that even love becomes an avatar of control and of constraint--the later stories explore the more tentative horizons of graspable liberties, the loves that might be the utopian ones, the momentary chances of escape from stifling and deadening relationships.

If for fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera eroticism and desire might represent a space of freedom, an assertion of the unique self in the face of an oppressive and corrupt collective ethos, for Klíma they seem to be another arena of repression, another theatre of psychic damage. Suspecting that national politics might inscribe itself onto the deepest contours of the individual, Klíma, in writing about the tremors of individual desire, is able to trace the seisms of the life of the state.

Throughout, Klíma demonstrates his mastery of the medium. These are beautifully crafted tales suffused with a deep and rare emotional intelligence. --Burhan Tufail