I found the writing good but the overall plot choppy and confusing. Apparently this end of a series, while I heard that the end notes clarify things I still couldn't really grasp the whole story. I'd have to read the whole thing. What I read still was quite good just incomplete. ( )

It's Škvorecký's last book and it's somekind a summary of his stories about Danny Smiricky and Czech history through two class reunion. You'll miss lots of little details if you don't know (or did forget) Škvorecký's previous works but the list at the end of the book proves to be a great help. ( )

In Škvorecký's last novel, Danny Smiricky returns to Kostelec for a second reunion with his high school classmates. Smiricky, like Škvorecký, emigrated to Canada and is now famous. The first reunion was in the sixties, before the brief Prague Spring, and the second after the 1989 collapse of the Communist government.

Škvorecký wrote his book after he turned eighty. He is reflecting on life under the Nazis and in Communist Czechoslovakia and after, tracing Smiricky's schoolmates and the people of Kostelec: the priest who was sent to Acuhwitz for marrying a Jewish girl to a Czech boy, both of whom were killed by the Nazis; the girl who reported them; the vicious bureaucrats, both Nazi and Communist; the ethnic Germans, brought up speaking Czech, who are drafted into the German; the people who stuck to their principles and suffered; those who had none and prospered. People from many of Škvorecký's novels wander in and out of this one, as the people from his past wander into his thoughts. He provides a list at the end, describing who the characters are.

Although this book drifts about and is not as well-written as The Cowards and The Engineer of Human Souls, it is definitely worth reading. ( )