Synopses & Reviews
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."
Review
"Among its many other virtues, The Engineer of Human Souls is perhaps the funniest academic novel since Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man." Newsweek
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"Josef Skvorecky is unquestionably an important writer, blending a great humorous talent with a restless, sustained, probing moral inquisitiveness . . . The Engineer of Human Souls will certainly introduce the reader to the distinctive Skvorecky world." Times Literary Supplement
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"[Skvorecky is] one of the major literary figures of our time . . . a novelist of the first rank . . . one of the masters of current Czech literature . . . His novels are sad, funny—and utterly gripping." The New Yorker
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"Skvorecky is so much of a writer that the moment he puts pen to paper, he can't help being an artist." Washington Post Book World
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"Starred Review. This powerful, moving, yet often hilarious novel is an example of cultural meditation at its best." Library Journal
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A deep pleasure to read.
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"By turns comic or sad and bitter, Skvorecky's book is a marvelous exploration of the human condition." Booklist
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"A complex, challenging analysis of contemporary politics and society, The Engineer of Human Souls will become a milestone in the evolution of world literature." Quill Quire
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"A funny, despairing, satirical, compassionate, sprawling, gloomy, provocative, prophetic, angry, and entertaining book. One of the most important novels ever written in Canada." Canadian Forum
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"Skvorecky would probably chide us for dismissing any of the injustices and griefs that abound in [the novel]. They are real and they are gruesome. And yet we put the novel down with a sense of joy at the plenitude of life." Michael Henry Heim
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"What better check on general doctrine than the poet's and the novelist's 'small stories,' the kind that Josef Skvorecky recounts with such verve and generosity." The Nation
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It is magnificent! . . . It marks an exceptional moment in history . . . It is a magnum opus. --Milan Kundera
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It is a relief to read him, to know that there are still writers like him who have things to say that are vitally important for all of us . . . What he writes about rivets the soul. --Alan Sillitoe
Review
"A deep pleasure to read." The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
"So entertaining that it would be dangerous to read it without laughing aloud."—Los Angeles Times Book Review