The Bride of Texas

by Josef Škvorecký

Josef Skvorecky, as a Czech émigré and Canadian citizen, seems an unlikely chronicler of the American Civil War. On closer examination, however, Skvorecky's choice of subject matter in his novel The Bride of Texas makes a great deal of sense: he has spent his career struggling with problems of nationalism, totalitarianism, and the crushing effects of history on the individual spirit, from his pre-immigration writings such as The Bass Saxophone to his great later works, including The Engineer of Human Souls.

He centres The Bride of Texas on a largely historical group of Czech combatants in the Union Army, whose stories Skvorecky discovered in the Czech archives at the University of Chicago while researching his novel Dvorak in Love. The novel follows the soldiers as they campaign for General Sherman in the closing months of the war, but it reaches forward into the post-war years and backward into the soldiers' pasts in the United States and Europe. Skvorecky develops his characters in decidedly romantic terms: Sergeant Kapsa has fled to the United States in the wake of a catastrophic love affair with an Austrian officer's wife; Cyril Toupelik falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful slave from a neighbour's cotton plantation; while his sister Lida (the bride of the title) is buffeted by a series of doomed affairs in both Europe and America. These narratives are interspersed with the autobiographical writings of Lorraine Henderson Tracy, a popular novelist, protofeminist, and confidante of the much-maligned General Ambrose Burnside.

This is an enormous, complex, and meticulously plotted novel. Though not perfect--Skvorecky's few combat sequences are disappointingly vague, and his treatment of the Civil War may feel too idealistic to some--it is unique. The closely knit Czech combatants never quite assimilate into American culture, giving The Bride of Texas an outsider's perspective that allows it to sharply illuminate the cultural, sexual, and racial struggles of both Europe and America. --Jack Illingworth

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Czech Literature

609 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Josef Škvorecký, CM was a Czech writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. Škvorecký was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. By turns humorous, wise, eloquent and humanistic, Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.

Reviews

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I enjoy reading Skvorecky, there's usually the same problem of consistency. Here are some brilliantly hilarious stories and anecdotes told by Czech soldiers fighting in the American Civil War; the soldiers are based on actual Czechs from the War but I doubt that the stories all are - but like with all yarns, that's hardly the point. The problem is that these stories are told concurrently, jumping back and forth in time, so I had the problem whenever the telling resumed of trying to remember where each of these anecdotes chronologically fit in with the others because one sometimes explained how the next took place. Still, I found these all very Czech and very funny. The second, and more annoying, problem was the account of a fictional female romance writer of the period. This mostly served as a vindication of the much-maligned General Ambrose Burnside. These were titled "Writer's Intermezzos" were more like "Writer's Interruptions" as they added nothing to the story, in my opinion, just an opportunity for the writer to put in his own two cents on what happened with the general. I liked the book, even if it wasn't Skvorecky's best, and it's well worth a shot if you have the patience to wait for the anecdotes to develop.

[Khalekan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never heard of this author before but took a chance on the book because it was described as a "War and Peace" for the Americas.

And it certainly lives up that accolade.

The story is told in flashback as Sherman's Army is marchin' thru' Georgia and concerms Czech immigrants making their way from the Europe of the Hapsburgs to pre-Civil War America.

Three doomed love stories unfold as the immigrants make their way from Bohemia to the New World, falling in love with slave girls and plantation owners.

But the social mores in America mirror those of 19th century Europe as people try to find loce across social and economic barriers.

A wonderful novel.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 1 out of 5]

Je donne ce roman lamentable une étoile faute de pouvoir le donner cinq étrons.

Reviewing Skvorecky is one of my pet Goodread Projects. Praising authors like Tolstoy whose books have received literally thousands of Good Read reviews is pointless. There is nothing I can say to encourage an interest in Tolstoy that has not already been said.

The situation is different for Skvorecky is different. He is the greatest Canadian author of all time and yet he is slowly being forgotten because no one is promoting him. For example, at the time I am writing this, only two other individuals have written reviews in English of the Bride of Texas.

Unfortunately, my duty as a Skoverecky promoter is to urge readers to avoid this book like the plague. He has written 15 books that I recommend strongly. I ask his fans to forgive him for this monstrosity and to try one of his many excellent works.

Contrary to Skvorecky's other historical novel set in the USA (i.e. Dvorak in Love) where he demonstrates an excellent understanding of the Eastern Cultural elite, he completely fails to grasp the nature of the psychological forces in the Northern States that drove them to fight a brutal war against their Southern Brethren. Americans living in the free Northern states wished vehemently to preserve their country in its Protestant, Egalitarian and Democratic form. Opposition to slavery in the Anglo-Saxon world started with radical Christian churches like the Quakers, then spread to the Low Church (i.e. Methodists) and finally to the established Presbyterian and Episcopalian or Anglican Churches. The same progression later occurred in the Woman's Suffrage movement and the much-maligned temperance crusade.

The fact that anti-slavery crusade was led by fervent Protestant Christians who were trades people, small business owners and farmers. is something that Skvorecky fails to grasp. He appears to think that the Abolitionists were Garibaldian liberals and hence somewhat similar to the Czech nationalists of the generation of 1848. This misunderstanding alone makes the novel quite ludicrous.

I also have a great trouble with Skvorecky's view of Czech immigrants at the time of the civil war. I am a Skvorecky fan because he is the only writer who was ever able to describe the great difficulty that the educated Slavs who arrived in North America after WWII had in explaining their life to educated North Americans. Again, in Dvorark in Love, Skvorecky succeeds in recreating the trans-atlantic dialogue between leading Slavic artists like Paderewski or Dvorark and Anglo North American arts patrons in the 1890s.

In the Bride of Texas, Skvorecky's Czech characters are pulled directly out of the charming Kostelec of his Danny Smiricky novels. They are cosmopolitan by North American standards, speak several languages and are competent amateur musicians. They seem in other words quite like the Czechs, Slovaks and Poles that I met at the University of Toronto in the 1970s. I would have expected them to be more like the older generation who had had very little formal education which moreover would have been conducted in German, Russian or Hungarian rather than their own language. They worked in physically draining professions like mining or forestry which left them neither the time nor the energy for cultural pursuits other than their Sunday Church services. It is likely that the Czechs who arrived in American before the Civil War had different characteristics again. However, I have a hard time imagining them speaking and acting like the characters in the Bride of Texas.

With so many excellent Skvorecky novels to choose from, one is best not to waste any time with the Bride of Texas.

[Rene Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skvělý román-symfonie se složitou kompozicí. Román, který by měl současným českým literátům připomínat, že "velkým" a "elitním" se spisovatel nestává psaním, podepisováním ani obhajobou bolestínských kolektivních manifestů v Respektu.

[John Pitcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Convoluted story of Czech union soldiers in the Civil war. Well written, but not recommended.