The Bride of Texas

by Josef Škvorecký

Physical description; xiii, 609p. : ill. ; 22cm. Subjects; Czech fiction — 20th century — Translations into English. English fiction — 20th century — Translated from Czech. United States — History — Civil War, 1861-1865 — Participation, Czech — Fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Czech Literature

624 pages, Hardcover

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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