It's 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing
period known as normalization, and Ludvik Vaculik has writer's
block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful
novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his
anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union
used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his
friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiri Kolar, Vaculik begins
to keep a diary, "a book about things, people, and events." This
marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook. Fifty-four weeks later,
what Vaculik turns out to have written is a unique mixture of
diary, dream journal, and outright fiction-an inverted roman a clef
in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real
leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the
most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the
1980s, it is a work that Vaculik himself described as an amalgam of
"hard-boiled documentary" and "magic fiction," while Vaclav Havel
called it "a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great
novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity." A
Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech
literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before
been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner,
Vaculik's masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor,
and irony-an important portrait of the lives and longings of the
dissidents and post-Communist elites.
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