A Czech Dreambook

It's 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing restoration of Stalinist rule known as normalization, and Ludvk Vaculk has writer's block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, "2000 Words," which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Ji Kol, Vaculk begins to keep a diary: "a book about things, people and events." As the book opens, a lively debate is in progress within the dissident ghetto, sparked by a recent essay of Vaculk's ("On Courage") questioning the appropriateness of "heroic deeds" by a small isolated group in a context of public passivity an interesting position given Vaculk's role as the founder of the first samizdat book series, Padlock Editions, which illegally publishes and distributes the works of authors in the literary underground and political resistance, "Chartists" who support the recently-created Charter 77. Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculk turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal and outright fiction an inverted roman clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses and leading characters of the Czech underground, such as Vclav Havel, Jaroslav Seifert, Ji Grua, Ivan Klma, Vclav ern, Pavel Kohout, Ji Kol, Karel Kosk, Petr Pithart, Milan imeka, and Lenka Prochzkov (all using their real names) play major roles. Vaculk himself described the work as a mixture of "hard-boiled documentary" and "magic fiction," while Vclav Havel called it "a truly profound and perceptive account a great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity." The novel's themes the quest for human integrity; the home as house, hearth, and homeland; freedom and responsibility; loyalty; love, friendship and sexuality; the place and role of mankind in nature and the universe are explored with humor and self-deprecation in Vaculk's relationships with his immediate family (his family-therapist wife and two sons), his long-time mistress, his friends and writer colleagues, and a short, but stormy love-affair that begins and ends during the course of the novel. They are given an added dimension by the author's accounts of his dreams, which intersperse and sometimes merge into the narrative. This counterposing and intermingling of dreams with detailed descriptions of reality creates a sense of ambiguity, culminating in the surprising final sequence of the book.