Lovers for a Day

This volume of short stories by Czech writer Ivan Klíma (whose works were banned in his home country until recently) brings together material from the 60s and texts from the late 80s and 90s. Lovers for A Day is a book that traces the continuities of disenchantments and frustrations, of misunderstandings and fragile amorous hopes, over several decades of Czech life. Where the earlier pieces, with their explorations of private lives under a barely mentioned but ever present communism, show people who are warped by their circumstances--to the extent that even love becomes an avatar of control and of constraint--the later stories explore the more tentative horizons of graspable liberties, the loves that might be the utopian ones, the momentary chances of escape from stifling and deadening relationships.

If for fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera eroticism and desire might represent a space of freedom, an assertion of the unique self in the face of an oppressive and corrupt collective ethos, for Klíma they seem to be another arena of repression, another theatre of psychic damage. Suspecting that national politics might inscribe itself onto the deepest contours of the individual, Klíma, in writing about the tremors of individual desire, is able to trace the seisms of the life of the state.

Throughout, Klíma demonstrates his mastery of the medium. These are beautifully crafted tales suffused with a deep and rare emotional intelligence. --Burhan Tufail


Genre: Literary Fiction