Singing the European Blues

Josef Škvorecký is a prolific writer, but there is no doubt that his major body of work is contained in the seven semi-autobiographical novels he wrote during the past 60 years. The Cowards, dealing with the end of the Second World War and written during the early years of the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, was the first; Ordinary Lives, a remains-of-the-day elegy looking back at a disastrous century, is the most recent and doubtless the last. Like several of its predecessors, Ordinary Lives has been sensitively translated by Paul Wilson, whose several collaborations with Škvorecký constitute a significant contribution to our literary culture.

Roughly chronological, the self-contained volumes in the series encompass the history of his nation from the 1920s (Škvorecký was born in 1924) to the years after the Velvet Revolution. If we add Dvorak in Love (1986) and The Bride of Texas (1995), his novel about Czechs in...