Synopses & Reviews
Karel Capek's delightful book, divided chronologically into chapters for each month, paints a comically self-effacing and impressionistic picture of a gardener's ups and downs as he negotiates the unpredictable forces of nature that govern the life of his garden, from January through December. Capek's sense of the powerlessness both in society and the natural world was magnified by the historical circumstances surrounding him, and he uses this sense to great comic effect in The Gardener's Year.
His distinct voice is the foundation of a narrative that conveys a wonderfully vivid -- and at times wonderfully absurd -- sense of the way in which we try to grapple with the seductions, blows, and boons of the natural world.
About the Author
Karen Capek is widely considered the greatest Czech author of the first half of the twentieth century. A novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist, he was a strong dissident voice during the period of fascist buildup in Europe between the World Wars. Most famous for his play
R.U.R., which coined the word “robot,” he wrote a number of satires, as well as the utopian fantasy novel
War with the Newts. He died in 1938.
Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Botany of Desire and Second Nature, named one of the best gardening books of the twentieth century by the American Horticultural Society. He is a contributing editor to Harpers magazine and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Pollan chose the books for the Modern Library Gardening series because, as he writes, “these writers are some of the great talkers in the rich, provocative, and frequently uproarious conversation that, metaphorically at least, has been taking place over the back fence of our gardens at least since the time of Pliny.”