Times Literary Supplement
Provides perhaps the best insight so far into the particular socialist variant of the universal rat-race.
Publishers Weekly
Written 30 years ago, this Rabelaisian and restless novel from Czech mountebank P ral, a contemporary of Milan Kundera, describes the lives of the inhabitants of a chemical factory's employee-housing complex. Story lines often involve competition for coveted space in the building, and they intersect in perversely coincidental ways as the chronicle unfolds across decades. For instance, siblings Madda, Alex and Julda live together until Julda discovers Madda and Alex in flagrante delicto and throws Madda out, forcing her to live with neighbors. The neighbors' adolescent son develops an obsessive crush on physically filthy but intensely sexual Madda, but she's not interested in him. Finally, the boy commits a violent act that solves his romantic problem, at least symbolically. In another apartment, aging beauty Zita recaptures her passion in adultery. Elsewhere, young Jana lives innocently, eventually marrying Borek, an itinerant worker living in the building. The book follows this marriage for many years, until a new generation arrives and makes the same mistakes as its predecessor. The novel's playful, relentless energy combines with sexual and political candidness to make grand, cartoonish comedy of a bleak situation. P ral integrates characters' daydreams with his narrative, in turn mixing these with bursts of stream of consciousness that deepen his provocative probing of characters' psyches. The sociological oppression of the factory workers and the unfair division of wealth become part of the comedy as well. Although the translation is at times clunky, Cravens generally brings out the poetry in P ral's original, inspired epic of life in Eastern Europe. (Feb. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
A small apartment house, owned by a chemical company in the northern Czech city of Ust! nad Labem, is the focus of P ral's exploration (first published in 1969) of the small-mindedness of humanity. Every resident over the years is dissatisfied with his or her lot. The young men want sex, the young women usually want marriage, and everyone schemes for a better apartment with hot water. Sex, power, jealousy, and greed fuel virtually every human interaction, and the saintly residents are murdered. Although P ral's jaundiced view of his fellow man is vitriolic, it is also very funny. While his workers' paradise is reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, the author shows an impressive mastery of literary technique as he pieces together the lives of his characters in a dazzling mosaic. Because P ral (Catapult, The Four Sonyas) was able to publish throughout the Communist regime, his writing was not viewed favorably and hence not translated by those in the Czech expatriate community. Fortunately, his satiric look at life under communism is now available to all lovers of good literature. Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An amusing if intermittently exhausting black comedy (originally published in 1969): the third volume of its eloquent Czech author's "black pentology" (Catapult, 2000; The Five Sonyas, not reviewed), about the aftermath of the 1960 revolution. It focuses on low-level chemist Borek Trojan and a bewildering array of colleagues, relatives, lovers, and neighbors, most of whom live in a small apartment building where the struggle for more space and finer accommodations assumes the proportions of both bedroom farce and mortal combat. Cravens's brisk translation gives Paral's labyrinthine sentences and paragraphs a welcome colloquial kick, making this merciless satire on bureaucracy and consumerism, among other human failings, a surprisingly entertaining reading experience.
