Love And Garbage

(Paperback)

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Description

The narrator of Ivan Klima's novel has temporarily abandoned his work-in-progress - an essay on Kafka - and exchanged his writer's pen for the orange vest of a Prague road-sweeper. As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and, obsessively, on his passionate and adulterous love affair with the sculptress Daria. Gradually he admits the impossibility of being at once an honest writer and an honest lover, and with that agonizing discovery comes a moment of choice.

Reviews

A sad and hauntingly beautiful elegy for just about everything mortal * Time Out *
Few writers have the invention and skill to juxtapose within one novel so many diverse themes, mundane and sublime, savage and compassionate, held in a satisfying balance. He tosses time and space about in a net seeking to catch the eternal * Observer *
The dilapidated regime Love and Garbage depicts is now of course on history's rubbish dump. One of those who helped to put it there is this writer * Sunday Times *

Author Bio

Ivan Klima was born in 1931 in Prague. He was the editor of the journal of the Czech Writer's Union during the Prague Spring. In 1969 he was a visiting professor to the University of Michigan. He returned to Czechoslovakia the following year. He is the author of many plays and novels including Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, The Ultimate Intimacy and No Saints or Angels. Klima was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2002.