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Overview"Alongside Milan Kundera's ""The Joke"", ""The Axe"" was one of the most influential novels to appear in Czechoslovakia during the cultural reawakening of the 1960s. Blending lyricism and iconoclasm, Vaculik portrays a culture in upheaval through the timeless story of father and son, joined by idealism but separated by a changing world. It is the mid-1960s, and one middle-aged journalist, disillusioned with communist politics, retreats from Prague to the Moravian countryside of his childhood. There he rediscovers a complex relationship with his dead father, a crusader for communism in the early days, who reappears through letters written decades earlier. When the narrator is accused of disgracing his father and his proletariat background, he realizes that he, too, is a leader - but the stakes now are reversed." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Ludvik Vaculik , Marian SlingPublisher: Northwestern University Press Imprint: Northwestern University Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 13.80cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 21.60cm Weight: 0.262kg ISBN: 9780810110182ISBN 10: 0810110180 Pages: 220 Publication Date: 30 December 1994 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviews[Vaculik], simply, is a joy to read. --Josef Skvorecky Vaculik's stunning success if in his shifting, playful technique, dazzling in its variety of tones, and great fun to read. --The Nation An axe is double-edged: it can clear the way or wantonly destroy. To the narrator, a fractious Prague journalist visiting his youngest brother ( the bus-driver ) in their native village to recover from the effects of office contretemps that almost (but not quite) cost him his job, its thud brings back an echo of himself as a young boy watching his father, a landless peasant and lumberman turned clear-eyed and steel-willed Party aktiv, felling trees on the hillside. His father is five years dead and buried, but his ghost still walks: is the son who condemns a father's lifework still a son? And is his legacy (he had, for his incorruptibility, been kicked upstairs from the local to the district committee and then to the chairmanship of a godforsaken collective farm) quite as untouched and untarnished as the Party bigwigs say? ( And what did your dad die of? a rebellious cousin mutters. Of his own accord. ) Having taken overlong in building the settlements as they would have liked them to be, people now find that they are getting the kind they used to want, the journalist-narrator observes; Vaculik's provincial towns are grim and drab. The old order is gone, and no new talent has arrived. Free spirits can only take refuge and consolation in the remaining fields where here and there, a grey stalk stands out. . . the lonely crop which repeats itself quietly year by year and waits. Or (like the narrator and his brother do) to make off with lumber from a fallen tree under the eyes of vigilant state authorities and use it to build a house. Vaculik, translated for the first time into English, speaks for Dubcek's vanished Socialism with a human face, but his people aren't strong enough to fill the space between his vision and his lovely Czechoslovakian landscapes. (Kirkus Reviews) Author Information"One of the outstanding Czech novelists of the postwar generation, LUDVÍK VACULÍK (1926-2015) has been a shoemaker, teacher, soldier, and journalist. His first novel, The Busy House, appeared in 1963. He edited Literarni Listy from 1966 until 1968, when it was suppressed by the government. His novel The Axe, published in 1966, made Vaculik famous in Czechoslovakia. Neal Ascherson describes this novel as ""the story of a lonely farmer who deliberately destroys his own family relationships and friendships to bring socialist collectivization to his village in Moravia and who--through the very challenge that his own integrity offers to the corrupt Stalinist bureaucracy of the new order--is himself destroyed."" Among the writers who criticized the Novotny regime at the Writers' Union Congress in 1967, Vaculik was expelled from the party but was readmitted during the Prague Spring of 1968. At this time Vaculik wrote the ""Two Thousand Words"" manifesto, which was signed by thousands and which some believe contributed to the Soviet leaders' decision to intervene militarily." Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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