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Danny Smiřický #5
Engineer of Human Souls
The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.
As adventuresome, episodic, bawdy, comic, and literary as any novel written in the past twenty-five years, The Engineer of Human Souls is worthy of the subtitle Skvorecky gave it: "An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, The Working Class, Secret Agents,
Love and Death."
As adventuresome, episodic, bawdy, comic, and literary as any novel written in the past twenty-five years, The Engineer of Human Souls is worthy of the subtitle Skvorecky gave it: "An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, The Working Class, Secret Agents,
Love and Death."
592 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
About the author
Josef Škvorecký
136 books142 followersJosef 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
August 31, 2020
Joseph Stalin called writers ‘the engineers of human souls’… And exterminated them thoroughly.
He who isn’t with us is against us… Such is the one and only law of ideology.
The Engineer of Human Souls is a nonlinear agglomeration of the past and the present, of memories and events, of teaching and living, of the comic and the tragic… And also it is an epistolary novel, at least partly.
The book comprises seven magnificent chapters: Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad and Lovecraft.
In the twentieth century, there were two deadly literary censors: communism and fascism – along with the books they destroyed those who wrote them…
Now the only censor is conformity… It isn’t as deadly but it is no less pitiless… It painlessly turns literature into cud… And readers ruminate happily.
I look up from the book. In Hakim’s eyes I see the scorn the men of the future hold for the men of yesterday, men to whom today still provides a brief respite before they are branded the betrayers of Hakim’s tomorrows. “Steer clear of the jugglers of concepts and feelings as carefully as you would avoid leprosy and the plague.”
He who isn’t with us is against us… Such is the one and only law of ideology.
The Engineer of Human Souls is a nonlinear agglomeration of the past and the present, of memories and events, of teaching and living, of the comic and the tragic… And also it is an epistolary novel, at least partly.
The book comprises seven magnificent chapters: Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad and Lovecraft.
…stiff literary censorship can trim even the greatest of the great down to official size. In our present age of normalization, however, we have come a long way from those wooden cowboy stories from the age of socialist construction, and those clipped geniuses, though the forms have been reduced, now have control of their pens, and no longer simply splatter ink all over the page.
In the twentieth century, there were two deadly literary censors: communism and fascism – along with the books they destroyed those who wrote them…
Now the only censor is conformity… It isn’t as deadly but it is no less pitiless… It painlessly turns literature into cud… And readers ruminate happily.
August 24, 2022
One of the best novels I read from some time and though it’s only February I can safely assume also one of the most valuable reading experience this year. I loved the way it blended absurd with seriousness, nostalgia with grotesque, black humour with hearty laugh, homesickness with plights of life on foreign soil.
I liked its structure and polyphonic composition, The Engineer of Human Souls is divided into chapters titled by the names of writers that narrator Danny Smiricky lectures about at Toronto university. And these are, among others: Poe, Hawthorne and Twain. Skvorecky uses one or more quotes to draw nostalgic, full of references to history, both times of war and post-war Soviet domination and finally after the shameful intervention of the armies of Warsaw Pact escape abroad, a tale of refugee. The chronology jumps back and forth, it also contains letters of Danny’s friends, but you quickly can grasp sequence of events.
The Engineer of Human Souls contrasts the views of Danny’s students with the views of their lecturer, and not only on literature. Using examples from Poe or Conrad Danny is trying to teach the young people something more universal but it seems rather hopeless task. They do not know history, nor understand it, and as someone said the eulogists of communist system are mostly people who never had to live in it and endure it, their intellectual potential seems too limited they could fully fathom the whole complexity and tragedy of the life behind the Iron Curtain.
Danny constantly falls in reverie and returns to his little town Kostelec, to enforced work in munitions factory during the war, to girls he loved once, he for sure was an amorous kind of guy, then again reagales us with tales on emigrants and how they differ between themselves, how try to cope with new reality to share his ideas on heroism and pragmatism, love and friendship, literature and freedom. Stories are wonderfully digressive, funny and warm, you can’t help but laugh reading about one tragicomic literary soiree or attempts to create somewhat fantastic liberation movement not to say hilarious story about seizing allegedly invaluable manuscript and all that in men's room; he’s equally reliable evoking his alienated new life and remembering the one that was left behind. And by no means it is idyllic picture.
For every good story needs its heroes so Skvorecky provided delicious gallery of protagonists, quiet heroes and naive idealists, fatuous sycophants of the new order and its amenable servants. I want to mention only some of them: funny Debilinka who's looking for proper husband, a feisty and valiant publisher of Czech books Mrs Santner, melancholic Veronika and thin, skinny Nadia, the girl from Kostelec and if her story didn't move you I'm going to think there is something wrong with you.
To me the novel felt like something well known, Poland was part of that system either and this reading could be as well a tale of Polish emigrants abroad. I wish someone had written such a novel. Skvorecky conjured story about some generation of people that had that misfortune to live in two totalitarian systems in a row, forced to weave between nazizm and communism. But make no mistake. It’s not a nostalgia for the sake of old times, at least not only. It’s something that runs much deeper. It’s longing for lost things, for youth and innocence, for friendship and love, for Czech language and sense of togetherness and identity. It’s sense of being always a stranger and awareness that return is not possible for you can’t go home again like you’ll never be young again. Or as one of Danny’s friend stated once you can’t have both Prague and freedom.
The Engineer of Human Souls contains everything I love in Czech literaure or general in literature. It’s comic and broad then again pensive and nostalgic. Someone said about it that it combines the best of Kundera, Hasek, Hrabal and Pavel. And while the first one does not work for me completely, I do not know if I read him too late or too early to fully appreciate his artistry, the others are a recommendation enough. So if you ever enjoyed bawdy humour from the soldier Švejk, if you liked lyricism and sadness from Hrabal and Ota Pavel's subtle, nostalgia-tinged aura you definitely should be satisfied for these ingredients are wonderfully combined here. And the novel definitely is worthy of the subtitle the author gave it: Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, The Working Class, Secret Agents, Love and Death.
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July 14, 2016
I have long fantasised about leaving the UK, but it wasn’t until recently that I seriously considered the prospect. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago I took a trip to Prague, my favourite city, in order to feel the place as someone looking to live there [which obviously involves a different mind-set from that of someone going there on holiday]. To this end, I made an effort to speak to locals, of course, but focussed my attention on those who had moved from elsewhere. As you would expect, there is a healthy ex-pat community; and what I found is that many of these people were damaged in some way, were running from something [even if only themselves], just as I am and would be. Yet many of them still seemed to yearn for ‘the old country,’ without, it seemed, having any intention of actually returning there. And as I sat in various bars talking to these people, I started to wonder how I would feel, years from now, as an ex-pat myself. Would I begin to view the place of my birth romantically? Would a snatch of British accent on a street corner send me into sentimental reverie?
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký begins with mention of a ‘wilderness’, which is, for the narrator, the grounds of Edenvale College in snowy Toronto. The use of this word is, of course, intended to emphasise that Danny Smiricky, a Czech by birth, has in a sense been cast out, or, more accurately, has cast himself out, from his home country. Czechoslovakia, as it was known at the time, was first invaded by the Nazis, and then, after the war, became one of the Soviet Communist satellite states; and so it was, without question, a dangerous, unstable place for quite some time. Therefore, Danny is, in essence, a refugee; his decision to move was not made in search of adventure, as is the case with many novels dealing with the émigré experience, but in order to live without being in a constant state of anxiety or uneasiness. Indeed, he calls Canada ‘wonderful’, because ‘there is nothing to be afraid of.’
As you would expect then, oppression plays a major role in the novel, although it is often dealt with in a lighthearted, almost good-natured way consistent with the narrator’s personality and outlook on life. For example, the father of Nadia, the girl who a young Danny spends much of his time trying to lay, is sent to a concentration camp, and is presumed dead. Danny himself, meanwhile, is, as are many of the inhabitants of Kostelec, forced by the Nazis to work in a Messerschmitt factory, and subsequently becomes embroiled in a sabotage caper that he believes may cost him his life. Likewise, the evils of communism are frequently alluded to: Veronika, one of Smiricky’s students, was, we’re told, thrown out of a Prague theatre group for having Jewish blood; and, in one of the old letters that pepper the text, letters from Danny’s friends and fellow artists, a playwright informs him that his work has been suppressed, including a play that seems to have involved little more than a bunch of people shitting.
[“Memorial to the Victims of Communism” – Prague, Czech Republic]
Yet even in present day Canada Danny and the Czech community he regularly interacts with are not entirely safe from what he describes as ‘the many horrors of our life.’ There are numerous amusing chapters devoted to Czech informers and secret police officers and their attempts to entrap or, in the case of Magister Maslo, take out, these enemies of the state. However, even when recounting the most obviously comedic episodes – such as the female informer who Danny manages to get so horrendously drunk that she cannot keep her cover story straight – Škvorecký has a serious point to make, about freedom, the kinds of freedom that people like me often take for granted. For example, he notes Dotty’s crude t-shirt, which depicts a naked couple in the act of copulation, and for which she would have been arrested ‘back home.’ And one gets the sense that this is why she is wearing it: because she can, and because at one time she could not. One also sees something of this in Mrs. Santner’s passionate defence of a Czech author and his right to be as blasphemous or inappropriate in his work as he sees fit.
It is worth saying a little more about the Czech community, and indeed all of the minor characters in the novel, for they are so lovingly, finely drawn: autumn-eyed Veronika, who misses Czechoslovakia so much and feels out of place in Canada; skinny Nadia with the big appetite, who displays more genuine heroism than anyone else in the novel, and who, I have to admit, made my poor heart ache; Novak, who brings Danny a replacement for a record he had played a part, a long time ago, in losing; and many many others. But this, as noted previously, is due to Danny and the way that he sees the world. He describes himself as ‘a sadist with a soft heart,’ and that is a nice phrase, but I would lose the sadist bit, for he is a pure sentimentalist; indeed, he is the best kind of sentimentalist, which is to say that he isn’t naive, he merely tries to see the best in people. Even the informers and secret police officers are given something of the benefit of the doubt, and he treats them all with warmth. Moreover, he understands that if something bad happens, something much worse could have happened instead, and does happen, and is happening somewhere else in the world. Make no mistake, The Engineer of Human Souls is a relentlessly moving and beautiful book, written in the loveliest blue-eyed style.
In my introduction I wrote about yearning for ‘the old country’, and have mentioned how Veronika does just that, yet it is Danny who lives in his memories the most. Everything reminds him of Czechoslovakia, everything transports him back home, everything is a madeleine. So, for example, when his English is praised in the present, this instantly brings to mind for him a story from his youth, an incident whereby he spoke English to a German officer, and of course immediately regretted it. Indeed, while watching a film at the Svensson’s, as he experiences another of his flashbacks, he states that ‘associations’ are ‘the essence of everything.’ And, if you have read a number of my reviews, you will know that I agree with him, that, without question, were I to emigrate to Prague, that beautiful city that Danny left behind with such a heavy heart, I would still spend much of my time here.
“All of my thoughts are memories.”
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký begins with mention of a ‘wilderness’, which is, for the narrator, the grounds of Edenvale College in snowy Toronto. The use of this word is, of course, intended to emphasise that Danny Smiricky, a Czech by birth, has in a sense been cast out, or, more accurately, has cast himself out, from his home country. Czechoslovakia, as it was known at the time, was first invaded by the Nazis, and then, after the war, became one of the Soviet Communist satellite states; and so it was, without question, a dangerous, unstable place for quite some time. Therefore, Danny is, in essence, a refugee; his decision to move was not made in search of adventure, as is the case with many novels dealing with the émigré experience, but in order to live without being in a constant state of anxiety or uneasiness. Indeed, he calls Canada ‘wonderful’, because ‘there is nothing to be afraid of.’
As you would expect then, oppression plays a major role in the novel, although it is often dealt with in a lighthearted, almost good-natured way consistent with the narrator’s personality and outlook on life. For example, the father of Nadia, the girl who a young Danny spends much of his time trying to lay, is sent to a concentration camp, and is presumed dead. Danny himself, meanwhile, is, as are many of the inhabitants of Kostelec, forced by the Nazis to work in a Messerschmitt factory, and subsequently becomes embroiled in a sabotage caper that he believes may cost him his life. Likewise, the evils of communism are frequently alluded to: Veronika, one of Smiricky’s students, was, we’re told, thrown out of a Prague theatre group for having Jewish blood; and, in one of the old letters that pepper the text, letters from Danny’s friends and fellow artists, a playwright informs him that his work has been suppressed, including a play that seems to have involved little more than a bunch of people shitting.
[“Memorial to the Victims of Communism” – Prague, Czech Republic]
Yet even in present day Canada Danny and the Czech community he regularly interacts with are not entirely safe from what he describes as ‘the many horrors of our life.’ There are numerous amusing chapters devoted to Czech informers and secret police officers and their attempts to entrap or, in the case of Magister Maslo, take out, these enemies of the state. However, even when recounting the most obviously comedic episodes – such as the female informer who Danny manages to get so horrendously drunk that she cannot keep her cover story straight – Škvorecký has a serious point to make, about freedom, the kinds of freedom that people like me often take for granted. For example, he notes Dotty’s crude t-shirt, which depicts a naked couple in the act of copulation, and for which she would have been arrested ‘back home.’ And one gets the sense that this is why she is wearing it: because she can, and because at one time she could not. One also sees something of this in Mrs. Santner’s passionate defence of a Czech author and his right to be as blasphemous or inappropriate in his work as he sees fit.
It is worth saying a little more about the Czech community, and indeed all of the minor characters in the novel, for they are so lovingly, finely drawn: autumn-eyed Veronika, who misses Czechoslovakia so much and feels out of place in Canada; skinny Nadia with the big appetite, who displays more genuine heroism than anyone else in the novel, and who, I have to admit, made my poor heart ache; Novak, who brings Danny a replacement for a record he had played a part, a long time ago, in losing; and many many others. But this, as noted previously, is due to Danny and the way that he sees the world. He describes himself as ‘a sadist with a soft heart,’ and that is a nice phrase, but I would lose the sadist bit, for he is a pure sentimentalist; indeed, he is the best kind of sentimentalist, which is to say that he isn’t naive, he merely tries to see the best in people. Even the informers and secret police officers are given something of the benefit of the doubt, and he treats them all with warmth. Moreover, he understands that if something bad happens, something much worse could have happened instead, and does happen, and is happening somewhere else in the world. Make no mistake, The Engineer of Human Souls is a relentlessly moving and beautiful book, written in the loveliest blue-eyed style.
“The writer is the engineer of the human soul.” – Joseph Stalin
In my introduction I wrote about yearning for ‘the old country’, and have mentioned how Veronika does just that, yet it is Danny who lives in his memories the most. Everything reminds him of Czechoslovakia, everything transports him back home, everything is a madeleine. So, for example, when his English is praised in the present, this instantly brings to mind for him a story from his youth, an incident whereby he spoke English to a German officer, and of course immediately regretted it. Indeed, while watching a film at the Svensson’s, as he experiences another of his flashbacks, he states that ‘associations’ are ‘the essence of everything.’ And, if you have read a number of my reviews, you will know that I agree with him, that, without question, were I to emigrate to Prague, that beautiful city that Danny left behind with such a heavy heart, I would still spend much of my time here.
May 10, 2017
This is a book I have not read for many years, but since it does not have many reviews here, I'd like to add a few words. It is a magnificent novel - complex, readable, nostalgic, irreverent and often funny. Like several of Škvorecký's other books, it is partly a semi-autobiographical rites of passage story about the life of Danny, a young teacher in post-war Czechoslovakia, this one is also partly about his later life in exile in Canada.
May 13, 2016
A whirling epic from a master-in-pieces: a piece of wartime life manufacturing messerschmitts; a piece of life in Canadian exile as a professor teaching a cast of oddballs about Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft, and co; a piece of life hobnobbing with the spooked and strange émigré community; a piece of life in love with village girls and Scandinavian students; a piece of epistles of other lives in pieces; a piece of mind and no peace in mind. Ladies: let this man’s splendid arms wrap themselves around your literary brains.
December 26, 2010
I actually approached this book with trepidation. It is thick, with almost six hundred pages of the usual hardbound size book. The title is imposing, the author's name has the same foreboding sound as that of Kafka, the cover shows a typewriter with a sheet of paper flying upwards off it stair-like, with a blurb by Milan Kundera ("Magnificent! A magnum opus!") who is himself not easy to understand.
It turned out to be a delightful read, Czechoslovakia's answer to Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and, in the context of its common theme of literature in a state of repression, would have been more aptly titled: "Teaching Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad and Lovecraft in Toronto While Recalling the Nazi Invasion of, and Communist Rule in, Czechoslovakia." Nafisi would have been envious of this title.
This novel does not claim to be an autobiography but no reader can be blamed for suspecting it to be so. Or at least semi-autobiographical, maybe one which another writer describes as "an autobiography disguised as a novel." The principal protagonist (and narrator) named "Smiricky," like the author Skvorecky, hails from Czechoslovakia and was a young man there during the second world war. He migrated to Canada, settled himself in Toronto, and continued his career there as a writer while teaching literature in a university. The author and his wife Zdena Salivarova, also a novelist (I haven't read any of her novels but they must be mouth-watering, judging from her name) own a publishing house in Canada (publishing Czech authors) just like a character in the book.
In Jane Yolen's "Take Joy: A Writer's Guide to Loving the Craft" she says that a first-person-narrative type of a novel has a lot of limitations and pitfalls, among them being that the author cannot go beyond what the narrator is, or is supposed to know. This novel seemingly has taken up the challenge, is written in the first person narrative, but with a nice trick: Skvorecky incorporated therein letters to the narrator from diverse characters so one gets a sweeping panorama of events from various places around the world participated in by diverse characters with Czechoslovakian ties on or about the time of the second world war and the subsequent communist rule in the country.
Now one can see why I wrote in my last review previous to this that Jane Yolen's book was an eye-opener for me. Before, I just read a book and see how I react to it. Now I can go beyond the story and the language and appreciate the style and technique used by the author!
It turned out to be a delightful read, Czechoslovakia's answer to Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and, in the context of its common theme of literature in a state of repression, would have been more aptly titled: "Teaching Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad and Lovecraft in Toronto While Recalling the Nazi Invasion of, and Communist Rule in, Czechoslovakia." Nafisi would have been envious of this title.
This novel does not claim to be an autobiography but no reader can be blamed for suspecting it to be so. Or at least semi-autobiographical, maybe one which another writer describes as "an autobiography disguised as a novel." The principal protagonist (and narrator) named "Smiricky," like the author Skvorecky, hails from Czechoslovakia and was a young man there during the second world war. He migrated to Canada, settled himself in Toronto, and continued his career there as a writer while teaching literature in a university. The author and his wife Zdena Salivarova, also a novelist (I haven't read any of her novels but they must be mouth-watering, judging from her name) own a publishing house in Canada (publishing Czech authors) just like a character in the book.
In Jane Yolen's "Take Joy: A Writer's Guide to Loving the Craft" she says that a first-person-narrative type of a novel has a lot of limitations and pitfalls, among them being that the author cannot go beyond what the narrator is, or is supposed to know. This novel seemingly has taken up the challenge, is written in the first person narrative, but with a nice trick: Skvorecky incorporated therein letters to the narrator from diverse characters so one gets a sweeping panorama of events from various places around the world participated in by diverse characters with Czechoslovakian ties on or about the time of the second world war and the subsequent communist rule in the country.
Now one can see why I wrote in my last review previous to this that Jane Yolen's book was an eye-opener for me. Before, I just read a book and see how I react to it. Now I can go beyond the story and the language and appreciate the style and technique used by the author!
January 20, 2009
"The Engineer of Human Souls" is a 20th century Czech novel and like every obediently disobedient 20th century Czech novel, it tells the story of a dissident male writer in trouble with his government for reasons that seem especially hazy in light of his more pressing preoccupation with philandering. With the surrounding political turmoil, meaning is extracted from love and art.
Dan Smiricky is a Canadian English professor and Bohemian exile from Kostelec. He goes about life teaching literature to mostly disengaged students and hanging out with his emigre community buddies, allowing these two worlds to touch, briefly and barely. Meanwhile most of his conscious thought is spent reminiscing about his youth, beginning with coming of age under the Nazis and the eventual end of the war and establishment of communism. Through a series of letters and scenes that bring us up to the present day we find out how the choices of his childhood friends have led to their various, far-flung fates.
"Engineer" is many things. Through Smiricky's lectures and informal debates among Canadians and Czech emigrants it's a damning condemnation of authoritarian government - not a philosophical objection to Marxism but rather an opposition to the violence and dehumanization of all externally imposed regimes, a perspective the Czechs can speak to better than most. Skvorecky's familiarity with and love of literature comes through constantly. The story is comical and hilarious: "it was gallows humour, of course, but perhaps there is no other kind." With all of the parallels between Smiricky and Skvorecky's lives it is likely more than a little autobiographical. It's a rumination on the fact that while man does not live on bread alone, bread certainly helps. (Most of the Czech women who have immigrated to Canada have done so on their personal charms, and we can't help but wonder about Dan and Irene) Most of all, though, it is Dan's memories and loves that are so striking. "They say that returning in daydreams to an idealized youth is the first sign of old age." His various crushes and liaisons throughout his life may be the most ordinary thing in the world, but it is these memories that stay with him and define his coming of age in a life that suffers the curse of happening "in interesting times."
Meandering, but lovely.
Dan Smiricky is a Canadian English professor and Bohemian exile from Kostelec. He goes about life teaching literature to mostly disengaged students and hanging out with his emigre community buddies, allowing these two worlds to touch, briefly and barely. Meanwhile most of his conscious thought is spent reminiscing about his youth, beginning with coming of age under the Nazis and the eventual end of the war and establishment of communism. Through a series of letters and scenes that bring us up to the present day we find out how the choices of his childhood friends have led to their various, far-flung fates.
"Engineer" is many things. Through Smiricky's lectures and informal debates among Canadians and Czech emigrants it's a damning condemnation of authoritarian government - not a philosophical objection to Marxism but rather an opposition to the violence and dehumanization of all externally imposed regimes, a perspective the Czechs can speak to better than most. Skvorecky's familiarity with and love of literature comes through constantly. The story is comical and hilarious: "it was gallows humour, of course, but perhaps there is no other kind." With all of the parallels between Smiricky and Skvorecky's lives it is likely more than a little autobiographical. It's a rumination on the fact that while man does not live on bread alone, bread certainly helps. (Most of the Czech women who have immigrated to Canada have done so on their personal charms, and we can't help but wonder about Dan and Irene) Most of all, though, it is Dan's memories and loves that are so striking. "They say that returning in daydreams to an idealized youth is the first sign of old age." His various crushes and liaisons throughout his life may be the most ordinary thing in the world, but it is these memories that stay with him and define his coming of age in a life that suffers the curse of happening "in interesting times."
Meandering, but lovely.
May 16, 2023
Gostei bastante deste livro, que li através do BookCrossing (bookring do PGV). Não foi uma leitura fácil, porque, por motivos vários, tive que interromper a leitura várias vezes por períodos mais ou menos alargados de tempo, e de cada vez, acabava por perder o fio à meada. E a meada não é simples, porque a história passa-se em épocas e em espaços geográficos distintos e as personagens são inúmeras. Os nomes checos também não ajudaram e dei comigo a confundir Ceehovás com Jirouskovás e outros nomes terminados em vás. Ainda assim, e apesar da leitura interrompida inúmeras vezes, gostei do livro por várias razões: o lado histórico, as inúmeras alusões literárias e, no meio da história essencialmente dramática, gostei do humor sempre presente (em especial das conversas filosóficas nas latrinas da fábrica da Maasherschimdt e das imprecações de inspiração zoológica do Malina... :)
April 19, 2015
Czech émigré Josopeh Skvorecky is one of my favorite writers. Skvorecky is a master at describing what communism is like without demonizing its opportunistic supporters in his home country.
I can think of no one else who is better than Skvorecky at describing the environment in Toronto during the seventies and eighties. During this time one met central Europeans everywhere: at work, in my neighbourhood and at all levels of schooling. They all lived through the experiences described by Skvorecky in the Engineer of Human Souls.
Most of these central Europeans arrived at a time when communism was intellectually fashionable due to widespread disapproval of America's intervention in Vietnam. The central Europeans who had lived under communist regimes tried to argue with the Native Canadians on the merits of communism and got shouted down.
The Engineer of Human Souls is the work where Skvorecky most successfully describes what it what was like to live in Communist Central Europe after WWII and then how you were received once you arrived in North America at the height of the Viet Nam war. At one level people liked you. On another they took you for a right wing nut. You got to live in a congenial environment but you were completely misunderstood.
You are most likely to enjoy Skvorecky if you are interested in the zeitgeist of Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s. If you are not the Engineer of Human Souls is still tremendous fun. Joseph Skvorecky possesses equal measures of Czech bonhomie and the incisive wit of Evelyn Waugh. You find Skvorecky's characters tremendously sympathetic. You are moved by their courage and weep at their misfortunes. Skvorecky expresses only love for the victims of oppression. He never asks the reader to hate the oppressor.
I love this book. Depending on your life experience, you might too.
I can think of no one else who is better than Skvorecky at describing the environment in Toronto during the seventies and eighties. During this time one met central Europeans everywhere: at work, in my neighbourhood and at all levels of schooling. They all lived through the experiences described by Skvorecky in the Engineer of Human Souls.
Most of these central Europeans arrived at a time when communism was intellectually fashionable due to widespread disapproval of America's intervention in Vietnam. The central Europeans who had lived under communist regimes tried to argue with the Native Canadians on the merits of communism and got shouted down.
The Engineer of Human Souls is the work where Skvorecky most successfully describes what it what was like to live in Communist Central Europe after WWII and then how you were received once you arrived in North America at the height of the Viet Nam war. At one level people liked you. On another they took you for a right wing nut. You got to live in a congenial environment but you were completely misunderstood.
You are most likely to enjoy Skvorecky if you are interested in the zeitgeist of Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s. If you are not the Engineer of Human Souls is still tremendous fun. Joseph Skvorecky possesses equal measures of Czech bonhomie and the incisive wit of Evelyn Waugh. You find Skvorecky's characters tremendously sympathetic. You are moved by their courage and weep at their misfortunes. Skvorecky expresses only love for the victims of oppression. He never asks the reader to hate the oppressor.
I love this book. Depending on your life experience, you might too.
May 23, 2015
Daniels Smiržičkis ir čehu emigrants Kanādā. Viņš ir literatūras profesors Toronto koledžā, viņš mēģina vietējai jaunatnei iedzīt galvā literatūras kritikas pamatus. Cenšas pastāstīt viņiem, kādēļ to dzīves uztvere īsti neatbilst realitātei, sevišķi, kad runa ir par sociālistiskā bloka valstīm. Vakarus viņš vada citu trimdinieku sabiedrībā, kur daļa cenšas saglabāt čehu kultūru, daļa sapņo par valdošās iekārtas gāšanu un citi vienkārši veido jaunu dzīvi. Visa grāmata paiet klejojot starp pagātni un tagadni, atklājot dažādus posmus Danija dzīvē. Piedzīvojumiem un raibām epizodēm bagāts, komisks un literāras erudīcijas piesātināts , “Cilvēka dvēseles inženiera stāsts” pilnībā attaisno tam autora piešķirto apakšvirsrakstu “Seno dienu enterteinments par dzīvi, sievietēm, likteni, sapņošanu, strādnieku šķiru, ziņotājiem, mīlestību un nāvi”.
Sākot lasīt grāmatu pagāja zināms laiks līdz noorientējos visnotaļ plašajā Danija paziņu lokā un viņu dzīvesstāstos. Pēc tam jau viss nostājās savās vietās, un nekāda svaidīšanās starp bijušo un esošo vairs nespēja izsist no sliedēm. Būtībā jau grāmatā ir divas galvenās sižeta līnijas - par Danija darbu totālās mobilizācijas laikā Meseršmita rūpnīcā un viņa dzīvi emigrācijā. No atsauksmēm biju sapratis, ka tur ir daudzi savstarpēji ne pārāk sasaistīti stāsti. Man viss šķita pat ļoti strukturēts. Iespējams, ka haosu nedaudz ievieš Danija bijušie draugi, kas viņam raksta vēstules. Tās lai ar hronoloģiskas rada stāstījumā pārrāvumus, kas prasa nelielu pārslēgšanos no viena pasaules redzējuma uz citu. No Danija uz plaukstoša kolhoza vadītāju vai ebrejieti Izraēlā.
Grāmatai ir diezgan daudz līmeņu, un katrs lasītājs spēs atrast savam izpratnes līmeni atbilstošo. Grāmatu var lasīt kā labu piedzīvojumu stāstu, kurā notiek daudz smieklīgu notikumu. Tas nekas, ka humors ir ļoti melns un laika reālijām atbilstošs. Pie šīs kategorijas ieskaitāmi stāsti par pieckājaino cūku, par sociālistisko atejas apmeklējumu, par mucu ripināšanu rūpnīcā, par latviešu tualetes apmeklēšanas paražām masu pasākumos. Stāsts par aizrautīgo amerikāņu detektīvu plaģiatoru un kolekcionāru Novosadu mani apbūra. Sevišķi tas, ka viņš nozaga visus Agatas Kristi detektīvdarbu sējumus uzbeku valodā. Izcila bija arī saruna grāmatnīcā par to, kas var būt rakstīts grāmatā, un trimdas šķelšana literatūras ietvaros, man patika vislabāk.
Var lasīt kā mīlas romānu, par Danija topošā literāta mīlestības piedzīvojumiem. Par viņa mūža mīlestībām, un kā tas mainījis viņa pasaules redzējumu. Var lasīt kā vieglu ironiju par trimdu, kur katrs trimdinieks uzskata, ka tieši viņš ir pareizo uzskatu paudējs. Par to kā visa tā tradīciju un identitātes glabāšana patiesībā ir viens garlaicīgs process, kas turas uz pāris entuziastiem. Ir arī spiegu romāna elementi. Tas, ka esi aizmucis no valsts, vēl negarantē to, ka valsts zaudē interesi par tevi. Danijam regulāri par draugiem uzmetas drošības dienestu pārstāvji, kuri patiesībā pat nav pārāk konspiratīvi, pārvēršot visu vervēšanu par farsu.
Tas vēl ir pāris slāņi, kuri man pagāja garām nesaprasti. Neesmu tik stiprs čehu literātos un literatūras kritikā. Tādēļ man nesaprastas palika lielākā daļa no atsaucēm, kas ietvēra čehu autoru daiļdarbus. Gods kam gods, tulkotājs un redaktors ir lāga cilvēki, kas visas zemsvītras piezīmes, ir ielikuši lapaspuses apakšā, tas ļoti palīdzēja lasīšanā. Otrs slānis, kas man aizgāja daļēji nesaprasts, ir nodaļu nosaukumi. Katra nodaļa ir nosaukta kāda autora vārdā. Tā kā no piesaukto autoru daiļrades es orientējos tikai Po un Lovkrafta darbos, tad man ir aizdomas, ka citās nodaļās es ko esmu palaidis garām.
Lasot grāmatu es nācu pie secinājuma, ka latviešu gaušanās par savu lielo neveiksmi laikmeta griežos un mūsu unikālo vēsturi, kuru neviens nespēs saprast, ir maigi izsakoties stipri pārspīlēti. Čehu tautas problēmas pirms un pēckara gados nemaz īpaši neatšķīrās no mūsējām. Un patiesībā es no šīs grāmatas uzzināju diezgan daudz par viņu vēsturi juku laikos, starp visām okupācijām un tautas revolūcijām.
Grāmatai lieku 8 no 10 ballēm. Noteikti ieteiktu izlasīt visiem, kurus nebaida grāmatas biezums. Viņa ir ļoti, ļoti interesanta - nenožēlosiet.
Sākot lasīt grāmatu pagāja zināms laiks līdz noorientējos visnotaļ plašajā Danija paziņu lokā un viņu dzīvesstāstos. Pēc tam jau viss nostājās savās vietās, un nekāda svaidīšanās starp bijušo un esošo vairs nespēja izsist no sliedēm. Būtībā jau grāmatā ir divas galvenās sižeta līnijas - par Danija darbu totālās mobilizācijas laikā Meseršmita rūpnīcā un viņa dzīvi emigrācijā. No atsauksmēm biju sapratis, ka tur ir daudzi savstarpēji ne pārāk sasaistīti stāsti. Man viss šķita pat ļoti strukturēts. Iespējams, ka haosu nedaudz ievieš Danija bijušie draugi, kas viņam raksta vēstules. Tās lai ar hronoloģiskas rada stāstījumā pārrāvumus, kas prasa nelielu pārslēgšanos no viena pasaules redzējuma uz citu. No Danija uz plaukstoša kolhoza vadītāju vai ebrejieti Izraēlā.
Grāmatai ir diezgan daudz līmeņu, un katrs lasītājs spēs atrast savam izpratnes līmeni atbilstošo. Grāmatu var lasīt kā labu piedzīvojumu stāstu, kurā notiek daudz smieklīgu notikumu. Tas nekas, ka humors ir ļoti melns un laika reālijām atbilstošs. Pie šīs kategorijas ieskaitāmi stāsti par pieckājaino cūku, par sociālistisko atejas apmeklējumu, par mucu ripināšanu rūpnīcā, par latviešu tualetes apmeklēšanas paražām masu pasākumos. Stāsts par aizrautīgo amerikāņu detektīvu plaģiatoru un kolekcionāru Novosadu mani apbūra. Sevišķi tas, ka viņš nozaga visus Agatas Kristi detektīvdarbu sējumus uzbeku valodā. Izcila bija arī saruna grāmatnīcā par to, kas var būt rakstīts grāmatā, un trimdas šķelšana literatūras ietvaros, man patika vislabāk.
Var lasīt kā mīlas romānu, par Danija topošā literāta mīlestības piedzīvojumiem. Par viņa mūža mīlestībām, un kā tas mainījis viņa pasaules redzējumu. Var lasīt kā vieglu ironiju par trimdu, kur katrs trimdinieks uzskata, ka tieši viņš ir pareizo uzskatu paudējs. Par to kā visa tā tradīciju un identitātes glabāšana patiesībā ir viens garlaicīgs process, kas turas uz pāris entuziastiem. Ir arī spiegu romāna elementi. Tas, ka esi aizmucis no valsts, vēl negarantē to, ka valsts zaudē interesi par tevi. Danijam regulāri par draugiem uzmetas drošības dienestu pārstāvji, kuri patiesībā pat nav pārāk konspiratīvi, pārvēršot visu vervēšanu par farsu.
Tas vēl ir pāris slāņi, kuri man pagāja garām nesaprasti. Neesmu tik stiprs čehu literātos un literatūras kritikā. Tādēļ man nesaprastas palika lielākā daļa no atsaucēm, kas ietvēra čehu autoru daiļdarbus. Gods kam gods, tulkotājs un redaktors ir lāga cilvēki, kas visas zemsvītras piezīmes, ir ielikuši lapaspuses apakšā, tas ļoti palīdzēja lasīšanā. Otrs slānis, kas man aizgāja daļēji nesaprasts, ir nodaļu nosaukumi. Katra nodaļa ir nosaukta kāda autora vārdā. Tā kā no piesaukto autoru daiļrades es orientējos tikai Po un Lovkrafta darbos, tad man ir aizdomas, ka citās nodaļās es ko esmu palaidis garām.
Lasot grāmatu es nācu pie secinājuma, ka latviešu gaušanās par savu lielo neveiksmi laikmeta griežos un mūsu unikālo vēsturi, kuru neviens nespēs saprast, ir maigi izsakoties stipri pārspīlēti. Čehu tautas problēmas pirms un pēckara gados nemaz īpaši neatšķīrās no mūsējām. Un patiesībā es no šīs grāmatas uzzināju diezgan daudz par viņu vēsturi juku laikos, starp visām okupācijām un tautas revolūcijām.
Grāmatai lieku 8 no 10 ballēm. Noteikti ieteiktu izlasīt visiem, kurus nebaida grāmatas biezums. Viņa ir ļoti, ļoti interesanta - nenožēlosiet.
June 16, 2020
Good lord! I thought I’d never get through this damn thing. Sixteen days to cover the mere span of 570 pages, to say it was slow going would be a supreme understatement. The Engineer of Human Souls reminded (in many more ways than one) of another WWII themed, post-modern behemoth I read this year, the dreaded Gravity’s Rainbow. Though it is markedly less of a mind fuck and more contained in its scope. It’s also written mainly from an autobiographical perspective which I found refreshing and helped ground the narrative, even during its more surreal flights of fancy. The similarities arise mainly in the structure and stylization of the prose, particularly with its recurrent use of analepsis and prolepsis, as well as its improvisational ruptures into streams of consciousness. There’s also an undercurrent of black humor as well as a slightly problematic and over-sexualized approach to its depiction of female characters. Though again, all these similarities are more subdued than what you’d find in Pynchon’s work. Imagine if Thomas was Czech, took that Ritalin I’d advised him to seek out, went to sex therapy, and wrote primarily from his own experiences in WWII…Then maybe you would approach something akin to The Engineer of Human Souls.
Plot-wise it concerns the life-story of our would-be narrator Danny Smiricky (though one must imagine Josef, himself). A black-listed Czech writer, who fled to Canada following the collapse of the Prague Spring in 1968, and who now teaches American literature at a private liberal arts college on the outskirts of Toronto. The novel recounts episodes from his life in a highly non-linear fashion. Bouncing from his time as a conscripted laborer in a Messerschmitt factory during the German Occupation, a time where he courted his first true love, a peasant girl with TB named Nadia, and their idiotic plans for subterfuge and rebellion which nearly get them killed by the Gestapo. It also recounts his immediate post-war experiences in the CSSR and his run-ins with the various Soviet informers and secret police. Finally it covers his present day experience as a professor in late-70s Canada, his disconnect with his students, a romance he fosters with one of these students, as well as his various run-ins with other figures in Toronto’s Czech immigrant community.
The overall experience of this narrative, due to its non-linear construction, is somewhat mixed…The novel is just too damn long. And the only arch that really captivated me was the romance with Nadia during the German occupation, though thankfully this comprises a majority of the text…Yet it ends around the four hundred page mark, leaving around two hundred pages at the end which seem completely unnecessary and even contrived. I started to skim read them. And if I ever stoop to skimming in a fiction book then something has truly gone off the rails. Which pains me because the first three hundred pages or so had me or less hooked so I felt obligated to see it out. Had it this book been trimmed back a good bit, and its focus recast on Danny’s years during WWII then it would be a knockout, nevertheless I think it’s still a worthwhile piece of fiction.
Another point of hindrance is the prose, which is anything but economical. Many of the scenes within the wider Czech immigrant community meander and involve way too many characters to keep track off (or care about) and the prose really starts to tread water once, during these sections, it goes into a stream of consciousness…they approach being unreadable. All in all I might recommend this to Thomas Pynchon fans or fans of the encyclopedic novel. For me it was just too unfocused and unbalanced an experience, not without its own moments of grace and profundity.
3.5/5
Plot-wise it concerns the life-story of our would-be narrator Danny Smiricky (though one must imagine Josef, himself). A black-listed Czech writer, who fled to Canada following the collapse of the Prague Spring in 1968, and who now teaches American literature at a private liberal arts college on the outskirts of Toronto. The novel recounts episodes from his life in a highly non-linear fashion. Bouncing from his time as a conscripted laborer in a Messerschmitt factory during the German Occupation, a time where he courted his first true love, a peasant girl with TB named Nadia, and their idiotic plans for subterfuge and rebellion which nearly get them killed by the Gestapo. It also recounts his immediate post-war experiences in the CSSR and his run-ins with the various Soviet informers and secret police. Finally it covers his present day experience as a professor in late-70s Canada, his disconnect with his students, a romance he fosters with one of these students, as well as his various run-ins with other figures in Toronto’s Czech immigrant community.
The overall experience of this narrative, due to its non-linear construction, is somewhat mixed…The novel is just too damn long. And the only arch that really captivated me was the romance with Nadia during the German occupation, though thankfully this comprises a majority of the text…Yet it ends around the four hundred page mark, leaving around two hundred pages at the end which seem completely unnecessary and even contrived. I started to skim read them. And if I ever stoop to skimming in a fiction book then something has truly gone off the rails. Which pains me because the first three hundred pages or so had me or less hooked so I felt obligated to see it out. Had it this book been trimmed back a good bit, and its focus recast on Danny’s years during WWII then it would be a knockout, nevertheless I think it’s still a worthwhile piece of fiction.
Another point of hindrance is the prose, which is anything but economical. Many of the scenes within the wider Czech immigrant community meander and involve way too many characters to keep track off (or care about) and the prose really starts to tread water once, during these sections, it goes into a stream of consciousness…they approach being unreadable. All in all I might recommend this to Thomas Pynchon fans or fans of the encyclopedic novel. For me it was just too unfocused and unbalanced an experience, not without its own moments of grace and profundity.
3.5/5
September 1, 2010
THE Great Czechoslovak Novel. Made me cry when I read it at 16, and it still does. Also laugh wildly, and think a lot.
June 17, 2022
This is my favorite of all his books because it's the one that most touched my heart. I read it years before I even thought of moving to the Czech Republic but I could still fell this book when I arrived and learned what he'd been talking about.
May 17, 2020
This is the story of Danny Sviricyi, a saxophone playing writer and Czech émigré who left communist Czechoslovakia for Canada and worked as a professor of English literature in Toronto - by Josef Skvorecky, a saxophone playing writer and Czech émigré who left communist Czechoslovakia for Canada and worked as a professor of English literature in Toronto. I think it's reasonable to say that it's probably fair to assume there is a fair bit of autobiographical material here - although it remains a novel and not an autobiography in disguise.
The book is told as a series of overlapping eras of Danny's life - as a teenager in WW2 working in a factory under Nazi control, under the communist regime, and as an émigré living in Toronto going between his students and the Czech émigré community. There are also many letters from his friends of childhood describing their lives. There is much to like. He treats serious subjects with a lightness, but never triviality. He manages to interweave the stories from different eras seamlessly and without confusing the reader. His style is attractive.
What he does best of all is to capture that sense of otherness and alienation. Most obviously this is to do with the life of an émigré in a friendly but always foreign country, but you also get the gap between his students and his older generation, between central European culture and that of north American, between those who left communism and those who stayed behind, and to some extent between him as a writer and observer and everyone else.
It's 0ver 30 years since communism fell in central Europe, so it is hard for many to remember, or understand quite what it was like. Reading this book you are always aware of how émigrés may have got away from a communist country, but that the communist hand was still out to capture you in one way or another. But it is never shown as a simple view of one side being right and the other wrong, both sides are shown with humanity and balance. And this all sounds rather earnest and heavy going - its not - it is light, funny and full of colourful moments even if there is always a melancholy tone underlying all of the book. For instance, the banter and games of the Czech workers in the Nazi factory are described well.
My only criticism is that I felt there was enough by about page 450, and whilst there continues to be much to life in the remaining 120 odd pages, it seemed to me about 100 pages too long. Nevertheless, I would happily read more of his work.
The book is told as a series of overlapping eras of Danny's life - as a teenager in WW2 working in a factory under Nazi control, under the communist regime, and as an émigré living in Toronto going between his students and the Czech émigré community. There are also many letters from his friends of childhood describing their lives. There is much to like. He treats serious subjects with a lightness, but never triviality. He manages to interweave the stories from different eras seamlessly and without confusing the reader. His style is attractive.
What he does best of all is to capture that sense of otherness and alienation. Most obviously this is to do with the life of an émigré in a friendly but always foreign country, but you also get the gap between his students and his older generation, between central European culture and that of north American, between those who left communism and those who stayed behind, and to some extent between him as a writer and observer and everyone else.
It's 0ver 30 years since communism fell in central Europe, so it is hard for many to remember, or understand quite what it was like. Reading this book you are always aware of how émigrés may have got away from a communist country, but that the communist hand was still out to capture you in one way or another. But it is never shown as a simple view of one side being right and the other wrong, both sides are shown with humanity and balance. And this all sounds rather earnest and heavy going - its not - it is light, funny and full of colourful moments even if there is always a melancholy tone underlying all of the book. For instance, the banter and games of the Czech workers in the Nazi factory are described well.
My only criticism is that I felt there was enough by about page 450, and whilst there continues to be much to life in the remaining 120 odd pages, it seemed to me about 100 pages too long. Nevertheless, I would happily read more of his work.
April 12, 2018
This is the follow-up to The Cowards, written about 20 years before. If you appreciated the Czech style of storytelling, you will not be disappointed with this one. There is noticeable progression in the writing style, which seems more mature, pensive and organized in this second book. It is a semi-autobiographical work featuring the inimitable Danny Smiricky. While the novel primarily revolves around Danny, there isn’t much of an overarching plot. Spanning a thirty year time period, it features Danny from his WWII experience in the fictional town of Kostelec (based on Skvorecky’s own home Nachod) all the way to his professorship in literature in Toronto. The book is divided into seven chapters, each named after a famous author whom Danny is in the midst of discussion with his students. It is quite a challenging test of one’s knowledge of these literary figures. Inserted between episodes are correspondences from people in Danny’s past, illustrating the fates of the Czech diaspora. My favourite storyline is Danny in the Messerschmitt factory and his relationship with Nadia the factory girl. At this time, he is still rather naïve, horny and hapless. He makes a pseudo-heroic attempt to sabotage the production of German fighter planes. But true to Danny’s character, it is a foolhardy undertaking just to impress a girl. His relationship with Nadia was more interesting to follow, more than his relationship with his student Irene many years later in Canada. Most of the stories from the post-WWII and Canadian stage seem to reflect an anti-communist stance. But even in exile or in fleeing the country, the political refugees are still not safe from the prying eyes and ears of the Czech secret police. They are presented as sinister but somehow do not seem as dangerous as the Nazis. The phrase “The Engineer of Human Souls”, coined by Yury Olesha and quoted by Stalin, is an honorific reference to writers. Yet there is very little in the story in relation to this. Danny himself teaches literature but is not a writer. Perhaps the reference is to the seven famous authors, but Danny’s students, who are from different backgrounds, have different responses to their works. Or it might be an ironic reference to Skvorecky himself as a writer. See last quote below.
The book is long but the stories are engaging, often amusing and sometimes poignant. Although there are some parts which don’t seem to fit in, but overall it was an enjoyable read.
Only the potential deportee attempted to use the word “freedom” as a trump. Between those paneled walls, the word sounded old-fashioned, like something that had outlived its time. The world has moved on. The issue is no longer freedom, that absolutist ideal of eighteenth-century madmen, but the extent to which freedom may be permissibly limited. It is is beyond those limits that persecution begins. The word “persecution” has a much more modern ring to it.
The trouble is that students are more interested in conjuring life out of fantasy than they are in examining its concrete details.
”Man will be free by not trying to be free. He will make a dialectical leap from Engels to Epictetus… Do not desire that everything happen as you wish, but desire that everything happen as it in fact does happen, and you will be free…”
Why do people write books in the first place? They want ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.’ This particular kind of torch carrying, however, is an incurable disease, and one of its symptoms is an attempt to improve the world. But men and women of the pen rarely succeed at this, because they are not men and women of action. Still, they feel – quite mistakenly – that all you have to do is show men of action the truth, and they will understand and know that the men of the pen are their allies. But the men of action, to act at all, have to ignore this manifold truth. To silence it with their own, singular, one-and-only begotten truth. Simplified truth. That is why ‘those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.’
The book is long but the stories are engaging, often amusing and sometimes poignant. Although there are some parts which don’t seem to fit in, but overall it was an enjoyable read.
Only the potential deportee attempted to use the word “freedom” as a trump. Between those paneled walls, the word sounded old-fashioned, like something that had outlived its time. The world has moved on. The issue is no longer freedom, that absolutist ideal of eighteenth-century madmen, but the extent to which freedom may be permissibly limited. It is is beyond those limits that persecution begins. The word “persecution” has a much more modern ring to it.
The trouble is that students are more interested in conjuring life out of fantasy than they are in examining its concrete details.
”Man will be free by not trying to be free. He will make a dialectical leap from Engels to Epictetus… Do not desire that everything happen as you wish, but desire that everything happen as it in fact does happen, and you will be free…”
Why do people write books in the first place? They want ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.’ This particular kind of torch carrying, however, is an incurable disease, and one of its symptoms is an attempt to improve the world. But men and women of the pen rarely succeed at this, because they are not men and women of action. Still, they feel – quite mistakenly – that all you have to do is show men of action the truth, and they will understand and know that the men of the pen are their allies. But the men of action, to act at all, have to ignore this manifold truth. To silence it with their own, singular, one-and-only begotten truth. Simplified truth. That is why ‘those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.’
January 6, 2016
We live in a world of absurd circumstances, accidental, perhaps the unfathomable caprices of a cruelly jesting GodI find that there is potentially a lot to say about this book, but, at the same time, in its straightforwardness, there might not be much that is necessary.
The book is centered around Czech exile Danny Smiricky, a literature professor living in Canada in the 1970’s. The book alternates between scenes from Danny’s youth living in Czechoslovakia – both during World War II and the Cold War – letters both between Czech citizens (many living abroad) and to Danny directly, and modern day scenes centered around Danny’s classroom lectures and time spent with other members of Canada’s Czech exiles community.
The historic scenes are the most straightforward the lot, painting a picture of the toil and hardship of living under German occupation, and then living under the communist regime. These scenes are all well done and affecting – they tend to lean more towards the tragic – and manage to explore both the socio-political landscape at the time, as well as operating a bit as a coming of age tale, one that would be both familiar – in its emotions and struggles – and alien – in its backdrop and setting – to most western readers. These scenes are both straightforward, and are mostly tinged with a black-and-white worldview that goes along with a youthful naivety.
The letters are more complicated – not in that they are hard to keep up with (though there are numerous characters and voices throughout these sections, they are mostly distinct and easy to keep separate), but instead that Skvorecky is not particularly interested in writing in absolutes, so instead the voices all contributed varied – and certainly at times contradicting – views and opinions on politics, war, rebellion, struggle, communism, and the like. This certainly goes for the rest of the novel as well; this is a nuanced, deep book, one that has a lot to say, and certainly has no issue utilizing both subtlety and, when needed, yelling-from-the-rooftops-type in your face tangibility. So these sections both continue with the “time-and-place” historic sense of the youthful scenes, but begin to interject more actual complications and nuance into the book.
The other sections, the more modern-day sections, manage to be the most successful and engaging of the book. The classroom scenes carry special importance in light of the book’s title – it is held to be Stalin’s definition of a writer – as Smiricky’s lectures in the classroom explore how literature manages to reach across language, how it continues to be relevant even through the passage of time, and how great literature manages to be prophetic; not only is it relevant looking back, but is relevant looking forward. These ideas are explored through Smiricky’s classroom lectures and discussions, and are tied to specific works and authors. Through these lectures, and through these modern day scenes, Smiricky continuously flashes-back to his youth, to where scenes of his youth are described in between the lines of his lectures. For Smiricky – and for many exiles from communist countries during the cold war – the past both interjects, and is something that never fully relinquishes its hold on you.
These scenes are also frequently funny – bordering on the absurd – and are a real joy to read.
This book was incredible; there really is no other way to say it. I am continuously grateful to Dalkey Archives for their publication of these works, as I would otherwise be unaware of them. This book deserves your time and attention. You will not regret it.
September 28, 2011
A swelerting summer delivered me into contact with this tome, in fact I bought it in Bloomington and then collpased into it, the parallel gravity of its temportal tracks swept me along. Sadly, I haven't been able to replicate the effect with other works by Skvorecky.
June 11, 2015
Nopietns, intelektuāls romāns ar parupju vārdu piešprici. Vietām traģikomisks, vietām skumjš un apslēptu šausmu pilns. Stāstu lupatu deķis par veselu laikmetu.
Pilnā atsauksme: https://gramatas.wordpress.com/2015/0...
Pilnā atsauksme: https://gramatas.wordpress.com/2015/0...
June 20, 2021
Arcydzieło. Zawsze będzie się dobrze czytać. Szkoda tylko, niestety, że przyczyny jej napisania chyba również zawsze będą aktualne.
April 19, 2015
Czech émigré Josopeh Skvorecky is one of my favorite writers. Skvorecky is a master at describing what communism is like without demonizing its opportunistic supporters in his home country.
I can think of no one else who is better than Skvorecky at describing the environment in Toronto during the seventies and eighties. During this time one met central Europeans everywhere: at work, in my neighbourhood and at all levels of schooling. They all lived through the experiences described by Skvorecky in the Engineer of Human Souls.
Most of these central Europeans arrived at a time when communism was intellectually fashionable due to widespread disapproval of America's intervention in Vietnam. The central Europeans who had lived under communist regimes tried to argue with the Native Canadians on the merits of communism and got shouted down.
The Engineer of Human Souls is the work where Skvorecky most successfully describes what it what was like to live in Communist Central Europe after WWII and then how you were received once you arrived in North America at the height of the Viet Nam war. At one level people liked you. On another they took you for a right wing nut. You got to live in a congenial environment but you were completely misunderstood.
You are most likely to enjoy Skvorecky if you are interested in the zeitgeist of Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s. If you are not the Engineer of Human Souls is still tremendous fun. Joseph Skvorecky possesses equal measures of Czech bonhomie and the incisive wit of Evelyn Waugh. You find Skvorecky's characters tremendously sympathetic. You are moved by their courage and weep at their misfortunes. Skvorecky expresses only love for the victims of oppression. He never asks the reader to hate the oppressor.
I love this book. Depending on your life experience, you might too.
I can think of no one else who is better than Skvorecky at describing the environment in Toronto during the seventies and eighties. During this time one met central Europeans everywhere: at work, in my neighbourhood and at all levels of schooling. They all lived through the experiences described by Skvorecky in the Engineer of Human Souls.
Most of these central Europeans arrived at a time when communism was intellectually fashionable due to widespread disapproval of America's intervention in Vietnam. The central Europeans who had lived under communist regimes tried to argue with the Native Canadians on the merits of communism and got shouted down.
The Engineer of Human Souls is the work where Skvorecky most successfully describes what it what was like to live in Communist Central Europe after WWII and then how you were received once you arrived in North America at the height of the Viet Nam war. At one level people liked you. On another they took you for a right wing nut. You got to live in a congenial environment but you were completely misunderstood.
You are most likely to enjoy Skvorecky if you are interested in the zeitgeist of Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s. If you are not the Engineer of Human Souls is still tremendous fun. Joseph Skvorecky possesses equal measures of Czech bonhomie and the incisive wit of Evelyn Waugh. You find Skvorecky's characters tremendously sympathetic. You are moved by their courage and weep at their misfortunes. Skvorecky expresses only love for the victims of oppression. He never asks the reader to hate the oppressor.
I love this book. Depending on your life experience, you might too.
September 1, 2007
Skvorecky, a Czech emigre who left his native land for Canada after the Soviet put down of the Prague Spring, and with Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal is one of that nation's great writers has really written two books here. In the book's dual plots - Professor Danny Smiricky looks back at his young wartime adventures while negotiating tenure and academic politics at a Toronto university - he manages both to capture the transition from young adulthood to adulthood and adulthood into old age.
If that makes the book sound like one of those elegiac
"coming of age" tales of 19th century England, it's far from it. Skvorecky's a Bohemian (as in the region of the Czech Republic) and captures his homeland's sense of in your face earthiness. His character Danny Smiricky's epic quest is that of any young man in any nation in the world - to get laid. He'll stop at nothing to do it - including sabotaging bombs in the munitions factory in which he works in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia.
The book is poignant with nostalgia, but, more importantly, it's funny as hell. Take away the Czech locale and WWII-era setting and this could be the long lost John Hughes movie.
Some books have a tremendous impact on you because of when you read them in your life. I found a second hand copy of this a couple years ago on the street in New York and bought it for a quarter. I've always said to myself I have to reread it to see if it holds up. I haven't yet - and maybe it's best that way.
If that makes the book sound like one of those elegiac
"coming of age" tales of 19th century England, it's far from it. Skvorecky's a Bohemian (as in the region of the Czech Republic) and captures his homeland's sense of in your face earthiness. His character Danny Smiricky's epic quest is that of any young man in any nation in the world - to get laid. He'll stop at nothing to do it - including sabotaging bombs in the munitions factory in which he works in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia.
The book is poignant with nostalgia, but, more importantly, it's funny as hell. Take away the Czech locale and WWII-era setting and this could be the long lost John Hughes movie.
Some books have a tremendous impact on you because of when you read them in your life. I found a second hand copy of this a couple years ago on the street in New York and bought it for a quarter. I've always said to myself I have to reread it to see if it holds up. I haven't yet - and maybe it's best that way.
November 26, 2012
This book disappointed me. I probably went in with too high expectations, given the bombastic language from the reviewers plastered all over the cover, suggesting that it was one of the best novels of the past few decades.
You've already seen the plot summary in other reviews. The book is punctuated by a half dozen chapters, each named after a major writer. But each of those chapters only deals loosely with that writer, usually through references to the college course taught by the semi-autobiographical author.
The main problem for me was that it overall didn't hold together enough to make me want to keep with it, due largely to the flashback style. Keeping all of the Czech surnames straight wasn't easy, and the plot lines were generally too fragmented to keep my interest. Nor did I find the vocabulary, phrasing, or feel of the language to be especially captivating. Reading it today also adds a complicated wrinkle to the attempt to figure out the relationship in time between all the different episodes - Czechoslovakia under the Nazis, under the Russians, the Canadian Czech emigre community in the 70's, and more. Finally, it's just too long, by half.
If you have an interest in 20th century Czech history, or if you are a college literature prof, you might find this to be captivating. For me it was a slog.
You've already seen the plot summary in other reviews. The book is punctuated by a half dozen chapters, each named after a major writer. But each of those chapters only deals loosely with that writer, usually through references to the college course taught by the semi-autobiographical author.
The main problem for me was that it overall didn't hold together enough to make me want to keep with it, due largely to the flashback style. Keeping all of the Czech surnames straight wasn't easy, and the plot lines were generally too fragmented to keep my interest. Nor did I find the vocabulary, phrasing, or feel of the language to be especially captivating. Reading it today also adds a complicated wrinkle to the attempt to figure out the relationship in time between all the different episodes - Czechoslovakia under the Nazis, under the Russians, the Canadian Czech emigre community in the 70's, and more. Finally, it's just too long, by half.
If you have an interest in 20th century Czech history, or if you are a college literature prof, you might find this to be captivating. For me it was a slog.
October 11, 2019
Don't let anything put you off from reading this book. Don't be deterred by its imposing bulk, the author's ominously East European name or the grim title (a quote from Stalin). This a wonderful novel: genuinely funny, with romance, pathos and a fantastic literary nerdiness. Danny Smiricky is a lecturer in American Literature in Toronto. He can smile with jaded amusement at his naive students, as his life travels back in time to his native Czechoslavakia, sabotaging parts for Nazi Messerschmitts during the war and hearing from childhood friends he left behind of the brainwashed naivety under Communism. The emigre community in Toronto is hilarious and Danny's unfailing libido entangles him in various scrapes. With chapters titled after American authors from Poe to Fitzgerald and Lovecraft, it is a feast for literature buffs too. In structure and tone, Skvorecky's work feels much more recent than 1977. This is grown up book with a child-like sense of fun, and I loved it.
March 28, 2015
Dzīvesstāstu lupatu deķis no abām čehu zemes okupācijām un trimdinieku gaitām Kanādā, ar brīvu lēkāšanu starp velnsviņzin cik stāstiem. Brīžiem viss nojūk, bet lielākoties individuālie gabali ir gana interesanti, lai gandrīz ar nerūkstošu interesi izlasītu visas 900 latviešu izdevumā lappuses un nodomātu "hmm, ja pagadīsies rokās vēl kāds Škvoreckis, labprāt izcirtīšu cauri".
September 16, 2012
An excellent book. It is one of those books that I did not want to finish.
November 14, 2022
Josef Škvorecký’s The Engineer of Human Souls is a polyphonic tsunami; a smouldering fever-dream of a novel constructed out of Eisensteinian montages of nostalgic reminisces and fleeting memories. It represents not only an attempt to understand the role of the artist in free and unfree societies, but a broader endeavour to understand what is universal. How do we make meaning and construct our identity? What role does memory and the past play in this process? How are our feelings and perceptions influenced by ideas and ideologies? Those uncertain, hazy approximations of reality which are at once so potent yet so illusory. It is a work which, in the words of its protagonist Danny Smiricky, acts as “a sounding board amplifying the dark pulsing powers of bloody experience”.
Škvorecky himself is something of a forgotten master. Born in 1924, in rural Czechoslovakia in a town then part of the Sudetenland, he experienced both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. He was conscripted as a slave labourer in a Messerschmitt factory during the War and served as a minor member of the local resistance. In the aftermath of the conflict, he studied literature and began to release a succession of highly popular and critically lauded works of a broadly satirical bent which fell afoul of communist authorities. As a consequence, he became one of the leading voices of a group of Czechoslovakian intellectuals including Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Václav Havel, and Ludvík Vaculik who played a pivotal role in the birth of the Prague Spring. However, in the aftermath of the Soviet Invasion in mid-1968, he was forced to flee Czechoslovakia for Canada. Here, he became a literature professor at the University of Toronto and founded a publishing house, 68 Publishers, which published the works of Czechoslovakian dissidents until the collapse of communism.
As a novel, The Engineer of Human Souls is far more conceptual than narrative-driven. Each of the work’s seven brilliant chapters vacillates around a lecture the protagonist, Smiricky, delivers to his students as a middle-aged Toronto university professor. These lectures are, ostensibly, literary reflections on the works of choice writers within the canon, namely Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad, and Lovecraft. Yet, for Škrovecky and his thinly veiled alter-ego, Smiricky, they function as a meditative canvas. He flits, at times seamlessly and at others with a deliberate, jarring impact, between literary critique and nostalgia so potent it borders on incapacitating. Letters from émigré friends’ which history has cast across the world arrive. He socialises with the local Czech diaspora, a group of dislocated and despairing eccentrics. And the mannerisms of his students evoke agonising pangs of what could have been.
Of course, the central thematic concern of the book probes the function and value of art in both free and unfree societies. Yet, for Škrovecky this question cannot be disentangled from much more profound questions about meaning, history, and identity. His protagonist lives in a world of associations – “all [his] thoughts are memories, everything reminds him of Czechoslovakia. The title, of course, alludes to one of Joseph Stalin’s - a man who quite palpably inhabits the margins of the novel – most oft-cited remarks:
The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Stalin, as many tyrants do, distrusted writers and intellectuals for numerous reasons. He feared their capacity to challenge simplifying narratives and ideologies. Their willingness to embrace complexity. And, most of all, their capacity to sculpt human emotion and tap into the memories from which we, with hammer and anvil, forge who we are and what we value. As demonstrated in the following passage, Škrovecky is at his core a sceptic:
I look up from the book. In Hakim’s eyes I see the scorn the men of the future hold for the men of yesterday, men to whom today still provides a brief respite before they are branded the betrayers of Hakim’s tomorrows. ‘Steer clear of the jugglers of concepts and feelings as carefully as you would avoid leprosy and the plague.’
Škrovecky seeks not to discredit ideas altogether. He does, however, see that the “nakedness of power” is all too often concealed by “a whore’s G-string of ideology”. He understands imperatives encoded within human nature better than the totalising ideologies and better than all too many modern observers; that, to most of us, “what we feel is more important than what we know” and that we all too often delude ourselves by thinking we live for wisdom when we really live “for the pleasure that wisdom brings us”. Perhaps then, the following ideas approximate more closely to the role of the artist in contrast to that of the man of action:
Why do people write books in the first place? They want ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.’ This particular kind of torch carrying, however, is an incurable disease, and one of its symptoms is an attempt to improve the world. But men and women of the pen rarely succeed at this, because they are not men and women of action. Still, they feel – quite mistakenly – that all you have to do is show men of action the truth, and they will understand and know that the men of the pen are their allies. But the men of action, to act at all, have to ignore this manifold truth. To silence it with their own, singular, one-and-only begotten truth. Simplified truth. That is why ‘those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.
Škrovecky’s style is ironical, at times jaded and cynical, at others warm, blue-eyed, and glowing. His is a book about memory and how it shapes us, its paradoxes, its power. The Engineer of Human Souls is genuinely touching and poignant because it is infused with human feeling. The tragic life and death of Danny’s wartime love, Nadia, whose dark “burning” eyes seem to peer off the pages and into the reader’s soul, is the conscience of the book. Marie and Irena, his other adolescent loves, act as his feminine ideal; the women who enkindled his capacity to love and continue to shape who is he able to love. Danny yearns for his youth despite its privations and brutality. And his is a paradox that all too many of us face as we ache for yesteryear in spite of the unreliability of our memory, the fact that, what we yearn for is a chimera.
However, in spite of moments of hope and humanity, there remains a nagging fear. Škrovecky fears indifference among us all. Among his students, tragicomic caricatures, who neither understand nor care about the injustice beyond the Iron Curtain. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the chapter on Conrad for Kurtz, as Škrovecky so adeptly puts it, is no singular phenomenon, but an all too human – and real – portrait of what we as individuals and societies are capable of:
'I think that fits very well with Conrad’s description of genuine revolutionaries. Idealists. People who are drawn to violence by what is best in them.’
'Because there is no other way to exterminate the savage customs of the old society than by violence,’ cries Hakim…
Now I am silent. For a long time…
‘Customs cannot be exterminated at all,’ I say quietly. They do not exist apart from people. Only people can be exterminated.’
Critically, the book also functions as a commentary on the art of the novel, offering what I believe is one of the most thought-provoking passages on how we ought to assess and comprehend great literature:
Faulkner once said that all novels are shipwrecks. Derelicts. and he was right. There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone without exception, has weaknesses and is trapped in his age and environment, and may even be ridiculous. But if he is an honourable man and if it is an honourable book, no one has the right to ridicule it or heap contempt upon it. Genuine lovers of literature will instead feel sorry that the author was not up to some things, and will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism. Such treasure is there, far more often than the snobs know, or are prepared to admit.
Where it comes to style, Škrovecky is marked by his erudition and polyphony while structural parallels with Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War are marked. The book is intricate and littered with metatextual, historical, and philosophical discourse. Yet, erudite as it may be, it is also beautiful. It flows with verve and zeal. Škrovecky does not write a joyful book, but effervescently renders life’s joys. Similarly, he also has the capacity to portray life’s sorrows with great beauty, embracing a sort of tired acceptance:
Man will be free by not trying to be free. He will make a dialectical leap from Engels to Epictetus… Do not desire that everything happen as you wish, but desire that everything happen as it in fact does happen, and you will be free…
The Engineer of Human Souls is not light reading, but it is rich, rewarding, mirthful, and discerning; a searchlight turned on ourselves and the societies we create. As one critic put it, the text never loses sight of “what is concretely human beneath the abstractions of ideology and history". It is, in my humble view, an under-acknowledged and unmissable masterpiece.
Škvorecky himself is something of a forgotten master. Born in 1924, in rural Czechoslovakia in a town then part of the Sudetenland, he experienced both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. He was conscripted as a slave labourer in a Messerschmitt factory during the War and served as a minor member of the local resistance. In the aftermath of the conflict, he studied literature and began to release a succession of highly popular and critically lauded works of a broadly satirical bent which fell afoul of communist authorities. As a consequence, he became one of the leading voices of a group of Czechoslovakian intellectuals including Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Václav Havel, and Ludvík Vaculik who played a pivotal role in the birth of the Prague Spring. However, in the aftermath of the Soviet Invasion in mid-1968, he was forced to flee Czechoslovakia for Canada. Here, he became a literature professor at the University of Toronto and founded a publishing house, 68 Publishers, which published the works of Czechoslovakian dissidents until the collapse of communism.
As a novel, The Engineer of Human Souls is far more conceptual than narrative-driven. Each of the work’s seven brilliant chapters vacillates around a lecture the protagonist, Smiricky, delivers to his students as a middle-aged Toronto university professor. These lectures are, ostensibly, literary reflections on the works of choice writers within the canon, namely Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad, and Lovecraft. Yet, for Škrovecky and his thinly veiled alter-ego, Smiricky, they function as a meditative canvas. He flits, at times seamlessly and at others with a deliberate, jarring impact, between literary critique and nostalgia so potent it borders on incapacitating. Letters from émigré friends’ which history has cast across the world arrive. He socialises with the local Czech diaspora, a group of dislocated and despairing eccentrics. And the mannerisms of his students evoke agonising pangs of what could have been.
Of course, the central thematic concern of the book probes the function and value of art in both free and unfree societies. Yet, for Škrovecky this question cannot be disentangled from much more profound questions about meaning, history, and identity. His protagonist lives in a world of associations – “all [his] thoughts are memories, everything reminds him of Czechoslovakia. The title, of course, alludes to one of Joseph Stalin’s - a man who quite palpably inhabits the margins of the novel – most oft-cited remarks:
The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Stalin, as many tyrants do, distrusted writers and intellectuals for numerous reasons. He feared their capacity to challenge simplifying narratives and ideologies. Their willingness to embrace complexity. And, most of all, their capacity to sculpt human emotion and tap into the memories from which we, with hammer and anvil, forge who we are and what we value. As demonstrated in the following passage, Škrovecky is at his core a sceptic:
I look up from the book. In Hakim’s eyes I see the scorn the men of the future hold for the men of yesterday, men to whom today still provides a brief respite before they are branded the betrayers of Hakim’s tomorrows. ‘Steer clear of the jugglers of concepts and feelings as carefully as you would avoid leprosy and the plague.’
Škrovecky seeks not to discredit ideas altogether. He does, however, see that the “nakedness of power” is all too often concealed by “a whore’s G-string of ideology”. He understands imperatives encoded within human nature better than the totalising ideologies and better than all too many modern observers; that, to most of us, “what we feel is more important than what we know” and that we all too often delude ourselves by thinking we live for wisdom when we really live “for the pleasure that wisdom brings us”. Perhaps then, the following ideas approximate more closely to the role of the artist in contrast to that of the man of action:
Why do people write books in the first place? They want ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.’ This particular kind of torch carrying, however, is an incurable disease, and one of its symptoms is an attempt to improve the world. But men and women of the pen rarely succeed at this, because they are not men and women of action. Still, they feel – quite mistakenly – that all you have to do is show men of action the truth, and they will understand and know that the men of the pen are their allies. But the men of action, to act at all, have to ignore this manifold truth. To silence it with their own, singular, one-and-only begotten truth. Simplified truth. That is why ‘those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.
Škrovecky’s style is ironical, at times jaded and cynical, at others warm, blue-eyed, and glowing. His is a book about memory and how it shapes us, its paradoxes, its power. The Engineer of Human Souls is genuinely touching and poignant because it is infused with human feeling. The tragic life and death of Danny’s wartime love, Nadia, whose dark “burning” eyes seem to peer off the pages and into the reader’s soul, is the conscience of the book. Marie and Irena, his other adolescent loves, act as his feminine ideal; the women who enkindled his capacity to love and continue to shape who is he able to love. Danny yearns for his youth despite its privations and brutality. And his is a paradox that all too many of us face as we ache for yesteryear in spite of the unreliability of our memory, the fact that, what we yearn for is a chimera.
However, in spite of moments of hope and humanity, there remains a nagging fear. Škrovecky fears indifference among us all. Among his students, tragicomic caricatures, who neither understand nor care about the injustice beyond the Iron Curtain. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the chapter on Conrad for Kurtz, as Škrovecky so adeptly puts it, is no singular phenomenon, but an all too human – and real – portrait of what we as individuals and societies are capable of:
'I think that fits very well with Conrad’s description of genuine revolutionaries. Idealists. People who are drawn to violence by what is best in them.’
'Because there is no other way to exterminate the savage customs of the old society than by violence,’ cries Hakim…
Now I am silent. For a long time…
‘Customs cannot be exterminated at all,’ I say quietly. They do not exist apart from people. Only people can be exterminated.’
Critically, the book also functions as a commentary on the art of the novel, offering what I believe is one of the most thought-provoking passages on how we ought to assess and comprehend great literature:
Faulkner once said that all novels are shipwrecks. Derelicts. and he was right. There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone without exception, has weaknesses and is trapped in his age and environment, and may even be ridiculous. But if he is an honourable man and if it is an honourable book, no one has the right to ridicule it or heap contempt upon it. Genuine lovers of literature will instead feel sorry that the author was not up to some things, and will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism. Such treasure is there, far more often than the snobs know, or are prepared to admit.
Where it comes to style, Škrovecky is marked by his erudition and polyphony while structural parallels with Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War are marked. The book is intricate and littered with metatextual, historical, and philosophical discourse. Yet, erudite as it may be, it is also beautiful. It flows with verve and zeal. Škrovecky does not write a joyful book, but effervescently renders life’s joys. Similarly, he also has the capacity to portray life’s sorrows with great beauty, embracing a sort of tired acceptance:
Man will be free by not trying to be free. He will make a dialectical leap from Engels to Epictetus… Do not desire that everything happen as you wish, but desire that everything happen as it in fact does happen, and you will be free…
The Engineer of Human Souls is not light reading, but it is rich, rewarding, mirthful, and discerning; a searchlight turned on ourselves and the societies we create. As one critic put it, the text never loses sight of “what is concretely human beneath the abstractions of ideology and history". It is, in my humble view, an under-acknowledged and unmissable masterpiece.
March 23, 2020
Mans atbildes trieciens pašreizējam "Es atzīstos" bumam. Bet gan jau arī lidz tam tikšu, cerams, ātrāk nekā pēc diviem trim gadiem, kā ar šo.
Sākumā negāja nemaz tik viegli, sākums ievelkošs, bet starp 100-200 lappusēm tā pagrūti gāja. Ja tiek tam cauri, tad pēc kādām 400 lappusēm sākas tāda Literatūras esence vairāku simtu lapušu garumā, ka tagad gribas vēl vairāk Škvorecki latviski.
Sākumā negāja nemaz tik viegli, sākums ievelkošs, bet starp 100-200 lappusēm tā pagrūti gāja. Ja tiek tam cauri, tad pēc kādām 400 lappusēm sākas tāda Literatūras esence vairāku simtu lapušu garumā, ka tagad gribas vēl vairāk Škvorecki latviski.
October 14, 2020
3.5 stars. I probably would rate it four stars if it were cut down about 100 pages. I really enjoyed some parts- some of the political and philosophical rambling wasn't interesting to me, but it could be to some readers. There are many well-drawn, realistic characters that were probably patterned after people Svorecky knew.
Skvorecky's shorter book The Swell Season has good ratings so I may try that some day.
Skvorecky's shorter book The Swell Season has good ratings so I may try that some day.
May 16, 2021
Přečetl jsem znovu po 24 letech a jsem zase nadšený. Škvorecký byl úžasný spisovatel a jeho kniha vůbec nezestárla. Pasáže o marxismu na kanadské univerzitě a o politické korektnosti mi před lety přišly jako hyperbola, teď už si to nemyslím. Hranice mezi lidmi nevedou mezi těmi, kdo sami sebe situují vlevo nebo vpravo, ale mezi lidmi, kteří si váží své i cizí svobody, a Hakimy, kteří ostatním chtějí vnutit svou představu spravedlivého světa, i kdyby přitom měli svět vyhodit do povětří i se všemi jeho obyvateli, a na Lojzy-adaptabilní kurvy obého pohlaví, které mají v každém režimu své "jistoty" a nevadí jim, když nad nimi práská bičem Heydrich, pak s nimi vyjebe Gottwald a po pár letech jejich stejně přizpůsobiví potomci zase dobrovolně líbají Brežněvovu knutu.
Ještě že na světě jsou také Nadi, Ireny, Marie, Veroniky a Nikoly.
Ještě že na světě jsou také Nadi, Ireny, Marie, Veroniky a Nikoly.
May 5, 2017
‘There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one’s dreams until some improbable future-a future inexorably shrinking away; where the fear which has pervaded one’s life suddenly vanishes because there is nothing to be afraid of’
So the main character of The Engineer of Human Souls observes from the relative safety of suburban Toronto, reflecting on his escape from a nation strangled by two oppressive regimes. The book is a collection of observations between his past and the present, and similarly an intermingling between tragedy and comedy. Few writers can lift you up with humour before bringing you crashing down with dark reality in the space of a few sentences like Skvorecky.
Freedom is a key theme here. How do we define it? Is it freedom of thought and action? Does being trapped in safety and obscurity mean an end to freedom as well? As he recollects his dilemma of choosing between enlisting in the Army or being in jail to escape the Germans, he reflects:
‘Being in a cage is more terrifying than being in the front lines. Without knowing it, I was articulating one of the basic truths of our age’.
Our only escape from being trapped is to tell the truth; literature being one of the universal truths. Literature has no agenda, unlike the Communism and the Fascism that Skvorecky’s beloved Czechoslovakia endured. It merely is, and this is how man can escape:
‘Man will be free by not trying to be free…..Do not desire that everything happen as you wish, but desire that everything happen as it in fact does happen, and you will be free’
The heavy political and religious overtones in this novel require a lot of context (time and place), but the universality of truth remains in this book. Like life, you'll laugh with an ache in your heart when experiencing it.
So the main character of The Engineer of Human Souls observes from the relative safety of suburban Toronto, reflecting on his escape from a nation strangled by two oppressive regimes. The book is a collection of observations between his past and the present, and similarly an intermingling between tragedy and comedy. Few writers can lift you up with humour before bringing you crashing down with dark reality in the space of a few sentences like Skvorecky.
Freedom is a key theme here. How do we define it? Is it freedom of thought and action? Does being trapped in safety and obscurity mean an end to freedom as well? As he recollects his dilemma of choosing between enlisting in the Army or being in jail to escape the Germans, he reflects:
‘Being in a cage is more terrifying than being in the front lines. Without knowing it, I was articulating one of the basic truths of our age’.
Our only escape from being trapped is to tell the truth; literature being one of the universal truths. Literature has no agenda, unlike the Communism and the Fascism that Skvorecky’s beloved Czechoslovakia endured. It merely is, and this is how man can escape:
‘Man will be free by not trying to be free…..Do not desire that everything happen as you wish, but desire that everything happen as it in fact does happen, and you will be free’
The heavy political and religious overtones in this novel require a lot of context (time and place), but the universality of truth remains in this book. Like life, you'll laugh with an ache in your heart when experiencing it.
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