false 839087 0676979475 9780676979473 25 3 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178810033m/839087.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/839087.To_the_Castle_and_Back_Reflections_on_My_Strange_Life_As_a_Fairy_Tale_Hero 71441 Václav Havel 524 63 2 0 false Thu Mar 20 22:09:35 -0700 2008 Mon Dec 17 15:32:27 -0800 2007 Thu Mar 20 22:09:19 -0700 2008 Vaclav Havel the playwright-turned-celebrity-activist then Havel the writer, and so I can only speak with limited authority (none at all really) as to how this compares to his larger body of work.

I don't think I'm being inappropriately harsh when I say that it utterly fails as a book. As a thing with a front and a back cover, and a linear progression of numbered pages which you move through by turning them over. The failure infact is to imagine this work as a book at all.

Fundamentally this is a hypertextual account of Havel's daily experience, largely mundane, as the Czech president. If instead of a book, this had been a website, or maybe a hypercard stack, that allowed us to scrub forward and back through time, and drill down on names and events, pivot on place and conflict, then perhaps this series of extracted diary entry and notes to staff would have built a meaningful picture.

Or perhaps I simply lack the patience right now, perhaps this is a book to revisit one snowy winter, without pressures or deadlines, or engagements, nothing but plodding days, in which to tease out a narrative structure that at first (and second and third) glance appears to be wholly absent.

Or perhaps the clue was there in the title all along, a Czech reader would have immediately and intuitively understood the connection with Kafka's "The Castle" and that the story was the journey to the heart of that shadowy and plodding bureaucracy and alienation.

I don't know. Maybe I'll pick it up again. But I'm not going to go on paying the library late fees.]]>