Identify Books As The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)
| Original Title: | Příběh inženýra lidských duší |
| ISBN: | 1564781992 (ISBN13: 9781564781994) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | Danny Smiřický |
| Characters: | Danny Smiricky |
| Literary Awards: | Angelus (2009) |
Josef Škvorecký
Paperback | Pages: 592 pages Rating: 4.16 | 834 Users | 80 Reviews
Relation Supposing Books The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)
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."
List Of Books The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)
| Title | : | The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický) |
| Author | : | Josef Škvorecký |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 592 pages |
| Published | : | February 28th 2000 by Dalkey Archive Press (first published 1977) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. European Literature. Czech Literature |
Rating Of Books The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)
Ratings: 4.16 From 834 Users | 80 ReviewsWrite-Up Of Books The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)
If Milan Kundera had gotten together with Orhan Pamuk to rewrite Snow with more of a postmodern flourish...Toss in 'the immigrant experience' and a dash of post-war paranoia, and we're getting close to this book. Absolutely loved the lit-classroom dialogues on literature and politics and the accompanying allusions and metaphors. I wasn't in love with his prose, however, as it was burdened from time to time (and time again) with cliche. Still a rich and resounding read.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 isnt much of an overarching plot. Spanning a thirty year time period, it features
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
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
I first read this book 20 years ago when I was living in Malawi. It was someone elses copy so I left it over there not realising it would take me 20 years to find another copy....It's a wonderful book, focussing on the lives of Czech emigrants in Canada, flicking back and forth between their life there and their earlier lives in Czechslovakia. It's thought provoking and entertaining, and well worth reading a second time...
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 mans splendid arms wrap themselves around
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.
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