spirit of Prague

This collection includes essays on the author's boyhood, partly spent in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin; on his beginnings as a writer; and an interview with Philip Roth in which Klima expresses his views on Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera, among other people and topics. There is also an essay on the creation of Prague's samizdat press and some rather cranky feuilletons, short pieces written for same. But the longer the essays, the more powerful. Klima's description of the genesis of organized opposition to the Czech Communist government after 1968 and his long closing work, delineating the role that certain painful personal experiences played in Kafka's writing, especially of The Castle and In the Penal Colony, are particularly important.