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A Summer Affair
The story of a doomed infatuation in which love is depicted as a sort of madness. A biologist in Prague lives only for his work until he comes under the spell of a woman whom he follows in an aimless existence, hopelessly compromising his family and career. By the author of "My First Loves".
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
101 people want to read
About the author
Ivan Klíma
102 books347 followersIvan Klíma (born 14 September 1931, Prague, born as Ivan Kauders) is a Czech novelist and playwright. He has received the Magnesia Litera Award and the Franz Kafka Prize, among other honors.
Klíma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement. He had been unaware that both his parents had Jewish ancestry; neither were observant Jews, but this was immaterial to the Germans.
In November 1941, first his father Vilém Klíma, and then in December, he and his mother and brother were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Theriesenstadt (Terezín), where he was to remain until liberation by the Russian Liberation Army in May, 1945. Both he and his parents survived incarceration—a miracle at that time—Terezín was a holding camp for Jews from central and southern Europe, and was regularly cleared of its overcrowded population by transports to "the East", death camps such as Auschwitz.
Klíma has written graphically of this period in articles in the UK literary magazine, Granta, particularly A Childhood in Terezin. It was while living in these extreme conditions that he says he first experienced “the liberating power that writing can give”, after reading a school essay to his class. He was also in the midst of a story-telling community, pressed together under remarkable circumstances where death was ever-present. Children were quartered with their mothers, where he was exposed to a rich verbal culture of song and anecdote.
This remarkable and unusual background was not the end of the Klíma's introduction to the great historical forces that shaped mid-century Europe. With liberation came the rise of the Czech Communist regime, and the replacement of Nazi tyranny with proxy Soviet control of the inter-war Czech democratic experiment. Klima became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.[4] Later, his childhood hopes of fairy tale triumphs of good over evil became an adult awareness that it was often “not the forces of good and evil that do battle with each other, but merely two different evils, in competition for the control of the world”.
The early show trials and murders of those who opposed the new regime had already begun, and Klíma's father was again imprisoned, this time by his own countrymen. It is this dark background that is the crucible out of which Klíma's written material was shaped: the knowledge of the depths of human cruelty, along with a private need for personal integrity, the struggle of the individual to keep whatever personal values the totalitarian regimes he lived under were attempting to obliterate.
For his writing abilities, Ivan Klíma was awarded Franz Kafka Prize in 2002 as a second recipient. His two-volume memoir Moje šílené století ("My Crazy Century") won the Czech literary prize, the Magnesia Litera, in the non-fiction category in 2010.
Biography from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Kl%...
Klíma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement. He had been unaware that both his parents had Jewish ancestry; neither were observant Jews, but this was immaterial to the Germans.
In November 1941, first his father Vilém Klíma, and then in December, he and his mother and brother were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Theriesenstadt (Terezín), where he was to remain until liberation by the Russian Liberation Army in May, 1945. Both he and his parents survived incarceration—a miracle at that time—Terezín was a holding camp for Jews from central and southern Europe, and was regularly cleared of its overcrowded population by transports to "the East", death camps such as Auschwitz.
Klíma has written graphically of this period in articles in the UK literary magazine, Granta, particularly A Childhood in Terezin. It was while living in these extreme conditions that he says he first experienced “the liberating power that writing can give”, after reading a school essay to his class. He was also in the midst of a story-telling community, pressed together under remarkable circumstances where death was ever-present. Children were quartered with their mothers, where he was exposed to a rich verbal culture of song and anecdote.
This remarkable and unusual background was not the end of the Klíma's introduction to the great historical forces that shaped mid-century Europe. With liberation came the rise of the Czech Communist regime, and the replacement of Nazi tyranny with proxy Soviet control of the inter-war Czech democratic experiment. Klima became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.[4] Later, his childhood hopes of fairy tale triumphs of good over evil became an adult awareness that it was often “not the forces of good and evil that do battle with each other, but merely two different evils, in competition for the control of the world”.
The early show trials and murders of those who opposed the new regime had already begun, and Klíma's father was again imprisoned, this time by his own countrymen. It is this dark background that is the crucible out of which Klíma's written material was shaped: the knowledge of the depths of human cruelty, along with a private need for personal integrity, the struggle of the individual to keep whatever personal values the totalitarian regimes he lived under were attempting to obliterate.
For his writing abilities, Ivan Klíma was awarded Franz Kafka Prize in 2002 as a second recipient. His two-volume memoir Moje šílené století ("My Crazy Century") won the Czech literary prize, the Magnesia Litera, in the non-fiction category in 2010.
Biography from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Kl%...
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 23, 2019
A Near perfect mediation on life, love and death.
The protagonist, a once obsessed scientist trying to develop a formulae for extended life, meets a young bohemian actress. A Summer Affair ensues...
If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. You've probably read another novel along these lines and done so recently, I just read my link text and can say there quite a few similarities, however, it was neither as memorable nor as deeply felt.
What you should know.
Death pervades the story. It provides an enlightening, if dark inquiry as to human motivation and the deep, if misguided, desire of his immortality.
Much as in Love & Garbage, Klima presents his reader with a passionate, intelligent man, thrown into an unexpected circumstance. By having the protagonist figure as a prominent researcher, Klima is allowed to project general truths about life that feel neither forced nor false given the context.
Overall, the novel functions as meditation on loss and our sense of helplessness in the face of passion.
Quotes:
'Maybe he'd fallen in love with his wife for the very reason that she did not remind him in any way of his mother. There was nothing exceptional in her appearance and no militancy in her mental make-up. The world of the arts had, happily, never touched her at all'
' lately he'd been feeling depressed, feeling that he was no more than an alchemist dreaming of discovering the elixir of life'
'The meaning of my life lay in holding her in my arms, in being able to listen to her breath and to be allowed to repeat to her: I love you. And because my life's real meaning, at least as I had always understood it, could not lie in anything of the sort, my life had no real meaning, just this instant of bliss torn from emptiness.'
'But there was no escape, he was trapped, he was tied to her, he was hopelessly linked to her emptiness'
'I don't know. One doesn't have to mean something with everything one says'
'They're dead people, nothing gives the pleasure, all they do is eat and sleep, and I feel that I too am dying among them'
'again- as once before in his childhood- it seemed unbelievable and unimaginable that he himself might one day not exist, that his body, his as yet perfectly functioning senses and his precisely and logically assessing brain should perish. That sense would the sea have then, and the sky above, and the air, what sense would the continuance of air have if he was no longer breathing it?'
The protagonist, a once obsessed scientist trying to develop a formulae for extended life, meets a young bohemian actress. A Summer Affair ensues...
If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. You've probably read another novel along these lines and done so recently, I just read my link text and can say there quite a few similarities, however, it was neither as memorable nor as deeply felt.
What you should know.
Death pervades the story. It provides an enlightening, if dark inquiry as to human motivation and the deep, if misguided, desire of his immortality.
Much as in Love & Garbage, Klima presents his reader with a passionate, intelligent man, thrown into an unexpected circumstance. By having the protagonist figure as a prominent researcher, Klima is allowed to project general truths about life that feel neither forced nor false given the context.
Overall, the novel functions as meditation on loss and our sense of helplessness in the face of passion.
Quotes:
'Maybe he'd fallen in love with his wife for the very reason that she did not remind him in any way of his mother. There was nothing exceptional in her appearance and no militancy in her mental make-up. The world of the arts had, happily, never touched her at all'
' lately he'd been feeling depressed, feeling that he was no more than an alchemist dreaming of discovering the elixir of life'
'The meaning of my life lay in holding her in my arms, in being able to listen to her breath and to be allowed to repeat to her: I love you. And because my life's real meaning, at least as I had always understood it, could not lie in anything of the sort, my life had no real meaning, just this instant of bliss torn from emptiness.'
'But there was no escape, he was trapped, he was tied to her, he was hopelessly linked to her emptiness'
'I don't know. One doesn't have to mean something with everything one says'
'They're dead people, nothing gives the pleasure, all they do is eat and sleep, and I feel that I too am dying among them'
'again- as once before in his childhood- it seemed unbelievable and unimaginable that he himself might one day not exist, that his body, his as yet perfectly functioning senses and his precisely and logically assessing brain should perish. That sense would the sea have then, and the sky above, and the air, what sense would the continuance of air have if he was no longer breathing it?'
October 19, 2017
I discovered Klíma by accident. No one I know has ever mentioned his name to me. His books tend not to be in the stores of English retailers. And then I found a couple of his novels in a second hand bookstore. That name piqued my interest. One of the two turned out to be the excellent 'Love and Garbage'. I became a convert. A few years later, I found 'A Summer Affair' in a similar store...
This novel is tautly written and compels the reader ineluctably toward its tragic conclusion. I can imagine some readers disliking the book because they disapprove of/cannot identify with the protagonist. That's to miss the point, I feel. In the grand tradition of 'Lear', it's about folly and obsession and losing everything. We're not meant to admire David as he destroys his family, himself and his lover. The twist at the end would have more impact if Klíma hadn't botched it by signposting it too obviously, but it's still powerful.
Beyond the beautifully spare prose, there are some other nice touches. I found the switching at key moments between omniscient third person narrator and first person narrative highly effective. The characters of the two lovers were believable too. If you enjoy reading about the interplay between human relations and philosophy - the Kundera parallels become unavoidable here - then this book may be for you.
This novel is tautly written and compels the reader ineluctably toward its tragic conclusion. I can imagine some readers disliking the book because they disapprove of/cannot identify with the protagonist. That's to miss the point, I feel. In the grand tradition of 'Lear', it's about folly and obsession and losing everything. We're not meant to admire David as he destroys his family, himself and his lover. The twist at the end would have more impact if Klíma hadn't botched it by signposting it too obviously, but it's still powerful.
Beyond the beautifully spare prose, there are some other nice touches. I found the switching at key moments between omniscient third person narrator and first person narrative highly effective. The characters of the two lovers were believable too. If you enjoy reading about the interplay between human relations and philosophy - the Kundera parallels become unavoidable here - then this book may be for you.
August 22, 2024
Nejlepší na této knize bylo, že měla konec.
June 21, 2020
" Čovjek ne može imati sve. Ne može podnijeti dvije strasti, jer će jedna progutati drugu i naposljetku ga uništiti".
Nije kao Milan Kundera , ali odličan češki pisac!
Nije kao Milan Kundera , ali odličan češki pisac!
June 20, 2025
Ik zou dit de meest matige roman ter wereld kunnen noemen, maar daarvoor irriteerden de twee hoofdpersonages me te veel. Jammer, had high hopes
November 7, 2015
Ο τίτλος του βιβλίου αποτελεί την αρχή και το τέλος για την υποθέση και το ύφος του κειμένου. Εξ αρχής γνωρίζεις ότι πρόκειται για ένα ερωτικό ανάγνωσμα. Πράγματι η ιστορία του Δαβίδ και της Ίβα επικυρώνουν τον τίτλο. Πρόκειται για μια ιστορία που κινείται στα πλαίσια του πάθους και όχι της αγάπης όσο θα επιθυμούσε ο Klima. Ο ήρωας φαίνεται να έχει ανάγκη από την απόκτηση εμπειριών αλλά και μιας περιπέτειας που θα ξαναζωντανέψει την μονότονη ζωή του. Η επιστήμη του που μολονότι τοποθετείται στο κέντρο, καταλήγει έρμαιο μιας τυχοδιωκτικής συμπεριφοράς.Όση πιθανότητα υπήρχε να βρει το ελιξήριο της αθανασίας των ανθρώπων, άλλο τόση υπήρχε να κερδίσει την πραγματική αγάπη. Θα ήθελα να δώσω τρία αστεράκια μιας και η γραφή του Klima όπως και η δόμηση του μυθιστορήματος είναι επιτηδευμένη. O διάλογος ζωντανεύει το κείμενο και κρατά σε εγρήγορση τον αναγνώστη. Ωστόσο το κλείσιμο του μυθιστορήματος είναι αναμενόμενο, ίσως και αδιάφορο. Ο συγγραφέας πιθανότατα θέλει να σώσει έστω και τελευταία στιγμή τον ήρωά του, να τον καταστήσει δυνατότερο και ισχυρότερο από την νεανική μοιραία γυναικεία παρουσία. Είναι φανερή η ανάγκη στήριξης της ανδρικής υπεροχής. Ο Klima δημιούργησε ένα ήρωα θύμα και σταδιακά τον έκανε θύτη αφήνοντας τελικά τον αναγνώστη να αποφασίσει για την τελική του εικόνα.
July 25, 2014
A realistic, if not cynical view on impulses, guilt, boundaries and passion altogether. Well-written, though with a rather dark ending to match a rather exaggerated heroine.
August 16, 2019
This is the first Klima novel I've read. I enjoyed it on the whole - it never felt like a chore to get through, although there were times when it seemed to spin on its axis a little and I skimmed the occasional paragraph here and there. To discuss the plot would be to spoil it, so I'll leave it at that. If you're looking for another Milan Kundera out of the Czech Republic then maybe there's something for you here, but this is a far cry from 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'
April 20, 2018
Bleak, heartfelt story about loneliness, ageing and relationship breakdown.
September 9, 2018
Passion may be the key to fill your life, but may ruin your life and the lives of others around you. This story had possibilities.
December 17, 2020
The book fell completely flat on many of its promises and did not deliver. It opens up strong with many intersecting segments, and I was expecting a lot of interplay on career ambitions, family life, and distracting affair. Perhaps that might be the greatest strength of the book - everything falls apart and the affair is completely engrossing. The reader is almost made to feel by reading, although it is not always enjoyable. A great cautionary tale nonetheless, and the ending was difficult to predict.
July 25, 2011
In "A Summer Affair" Klima describes David Krempla, a biologist who has always lived for his work, researching aging in an effort to prolong human life through science. He has a wife and two daughters, for whom he feels very little, and devotes himself to his research, believing that a man's existence is defined by his work. Until he meets Iva, a young, and wild student, who only lives for the moment. David is then thrown into a tumultuous affair that threatens his life, marriage, and everything he has believed in.
This is an excellent short novel. Klima returns to the topic of adultery (as he does in many of his novels) relating the struggle of an average, rather boring man faced with sudden infatuation and how this all-consuming passion both awakens and destroys him. While not as profound as some of Klima's other works (the great "Love and Garbage," "Ultimate Intimacy," etc.) this is still a good read. Klima masterfully builds the tension as David's life unravels to the the novel's ultimate devastating conclusion.
This is an excellent short novel. Klima returns to the topic of adultery (as he does in many of his novels) relating the struggle of an average, rather boring man faced with sudden infatuation and how this all-consuming passion both awakens and destroys him. While not as profound as some of Klima's other works (the great "Love and Garbage," "Ultimate Intimacy," etc.) this is still a good read. Klima masterfully builds the tension as David's life unravels to the the novel's ultimate devastating conclusion.
June 28, 2025
I could not find the edition I just finished reading , when I checked if I can add it ,found out a very complicated and slow process of Goodreads. Mine was a Penguin Books revised edition published 1985. The book is relevant for any time ,the feelings of David ,the main character ,can be taking place at any given time .This is a story of life changing loss that happens by a chance meeting in a funeral ,that David ,the main character , is forced to go by his wife .David's thoughts, dilemmas, feelings are very clearly portrayed .It is a tragic summer affair ,for a man researching immortality scientifically ,throwing everything stable in his life ,facing death ,loss and great loneliness .
July 23, 2015
I'd rate it at 2 1/2 stars. Quite well-written and I did enjoy it, but I didn't find it particularly insightful; lacks the multi-layered complexity of, say, the Bernhard Schlink short stories I read recently.
There also seems to be a dark and cynical edge to all the Czech writing I've come across so far. It's certainly here!
There also seems to be a dark and cynical edge to all the Czech writing I've come across so far. It's certainly here!
June 9, 2015
Klima writes very passionately about love, but some of the sentiment here is rather overblown and the lovers dialogue often unconvincing. "Darling, it's so marvellous to be with you" whilst they're having sex? Nevertheless there are some profound moments to be had. A lesser work by a great writer.
October 7, 2012
this should read "by Ivan Klima and Translated by Ewald Osers".
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews