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Writers from the Other Europe - Boxed Set by Philip Roth (general editor). New York. 1980. Penguin Books. Includes: THIS WAY TO THE GAS CHAMBER by Tadeusz Borowski (Introduction by Jan Kott), A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH by Danilo Kis (Introduction by Joseph Brodsky), LAUGHABLE LOVES by Milan Kundera (Introduction by Philip Roth), and SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS by Bruno Schulz (Introduction by John Updike). keywords: Literature Eastern Europe Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia Hungary.

 

writers from the other europe boxed setFROM THE PUBLISHER -

LAUGHABLE LOVES by Milan Kundera - Here are seven dazzling stories of sexual comedy by Czechoslovakia’s foremost contemporary writer. Praised by literary figures as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Philip Roth, Milan Kundera is master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these tales a young man and his girl pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on a road. only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another, a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another, girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all of the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses. As one critic has noted, Kundera’s stories are dances. experienced by Chekhov. X-rayed by Freud.’ ‘What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera’s Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what’s laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.’ - From the Introduction by Philip Roth. Cover design by Neil Stuart. Cover photograph by Bill Longcore.

 

A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH by Danilo Kis - ‘From the outside the storm [in Yugoslavia] over A Tomb for Boris Davidovich seems all the more peculiar because this book has literally nothing to do with Yugoslavia and its internal situation. None of its characters are Yugoslav: They are Poles, Russians, Rumanians, Irish, Hungarians; most of them are of Jewish origin. None of them ever set foot in Yugoslavia. Basically, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is an abbreviated fictionalized account of the self-destruction of that berserk Trojan horse called Comintern. The only thing that its passengers—the heroes of Danilo Kis’s novel—have in common with this small country is the ideology that this country professes today and in the name of which they were murdered yesterday. Apparently, that was enough to infuriate the faithful.’ - From the Introduction by Joseph Brodsky. ‘A Tomb for Boris Davidovich bears traces of Orwell’s 1984 and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, but it has its own special flair, particularly since it comes to us from someone who is there, on the other side.’ - The New Leader. ‘It’s an absolutely first-rate book, one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the whole experience of communism in Eastern Europe, but more than that, it’s really a first-rate novel.’ – Irving Howe. Cover design by Neil Stuart.

 

SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS by Bruno Schulz - ‘Schulz was one of the great writers. [His] verbal art strikes us—stuns us, even—with its overload of beauty. Schulz himself was a hidden man, in an obscure Galician town, born to testify to the paradoxical richness, amid poverty of circumstance, of our inner lives.’ - John Updike. In this brilliant, intensely illuminated book Bruno Schulz evokes a glorious, throbbing world through a magical combination of personal myth, fantasy, and highly sensual language. With an Introduction by John Updike written especially for this edition, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass is the final work of the Polish writer who was killed by the Nazis during World War II. An earlier volume of his stories, The Street of Crocodiles, is also published in Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe Series. ‘One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.’ - Cynthia Ozick. ‘If Schulz had been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.’ - Isaac Bashevis Singer. Cover design by Neil Stuart. Cover illustration by Bruno Schulz.

 

THIS WAY TO THE GAS CHAMBER by Tadeusz Borowski - Published in Poland after World War II, Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration-camp stories show atrocious crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine. Prisoners eat, work, sleep, and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line between the normal and the abnormal wavers, then vanishes. At Auschwitz an athletic field and a brothel flank the crematoriums. Himself a concentration-camp victim, Borowski understood what human beings will do to endure the unendurable. As one critic observed: ‘Borowski looks at the concentration camp as if it were first of-all a community of men and women, governed by unalterable instincts and formed by necessary habits. The constant need for human contact—in the persecutors as well as in the condemned—the clinging to ridiculous hopes and useless possessions; and at the same time the grotesque corruptions that become accepted as the consequence of the gift for survival. These terse descriptions, almost anecdotal in form, become an oblique commentary on the negotiations we conduct daily in our own, civilized ways.’ Cover design by Neil Stuart. Cover illustration by Christophe Davis.

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


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