Overview
Examining the way people manipulate and exploit each other, this novel tells of Sonya, a hotel maid who clings to a fairy-tale dream that someday a prince will come and save her. Since Sonya is young and beautiful, there are many princes who share her dream, but the princes are more like frogs, and instead of saving Sonya, they flirt with her, kidnap her, and give her mysterious directives. Dynamic and darkly comic, this novel's world is one where people will do almost anything to attain their dreams and where freedom is nothing but another fairy tale.
Synopsis
In Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Paral has been the most popular serious novelist for more than twenty years. His Balzacian comedies of lack of manners, mixing farce and pathos, are as entertaining as they are powerful. In The Four Sonyas, Paral uses a Perils-of-Pauline story to examine the way people manipulate and exploit each other. Sonya is a hotel maid whose only possession is a fairy-tale dream that someday a prince will come and save her. Since Sonya is young and beautiful, there are many princes who share her dream. But the princes are actually frogs who play with Sonya, kidnap her, and give her mysterious directives. However, even they are really no more free than Sonya, nor more successful in realizing their dreams. What makes The Four Sonyas truly special is the mesmerizing dynamism of Paral's writing. Paral is one of the greatest stylists among contemporary authors, and his unique prose works just as well in English as it does in Czech. Although Paral's darkly comic vision is of a degraded Communist society, it is in many ways just as applicable to ours. His world is one where people will do almost anything to attain their dreams, where people long for certainties, and where freedom is nothing but another fairy tale.
Publishers Weekly
In this 1971 satire, the Czech author of Catapult combines shrewd comedy with a highly critical picture of an inefficient, corrupt Communist bureaucracy. Its spirited, much-put-upon heroine is the beautiful Sonya, who is almost magically transformed from drudge to career woman. Sonya's travails begin when she is a teenager, working as a maid in the provincial Hotel Hubertus, where she is seduced and abandoned. Her employers regard her as little more than a prostitute and hold ``floricultural evenings'' in which their customers buy raffle tickets in order to kiss and fondle her. During one such evening she manages to escape with a mysterious stranger, and falls passionately in love. Her romance sustains her through the bewildering events that lie ahead--an abduction by a besotted engineer who brings her home to his sadistic family; her meteoric rise from kitchen helper to executive secretary at a large corporation. Throughout, Sonya is guided by messages from a ``fairy-tale prince,'' who, of course, turns out to be a far cry from charming. Full of melodrama and twists and turns, Paral's tongue-in-cheek adventure never falters. (Feb.)