Love And Garbage

'It is rare that one meets a new literary voice of such originality and mastery' Observer

A sad and hauntingly beautiful elegy for just about everything mortal

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

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

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.

The narrator of Love and Garbage 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 agonising discovery comes a moment of choice.

Ivan Klima

An agonised masterwork about the imaginary paradise of freedom

A great novel which transmits in detail the special qualities of life in a nightmare

Judge On Trial is Ivan Kl-ma's epic novel about those who stayed in Prague after 1968.  When middle-aged judge Adam Kindl is asked not only to try a double murder case but is also expected to find the accused guilty it is his own shattered faith in the political system that is put on trial.  To understand the crises he is experiencing in both his professional and personal life, Adam has to confront his own and his country's past which has been mis-shapen first by Nazism, then Stalinism, the false hope of the Prague Spring and the collaborationist regime that followed.

Ivan Klima

Praise for Judge On Trial

An agonised masterwork about the imaginary paradise of freedom

A War and Peace for the nineties

A great novel which transmits in detail the special qualities of life in a nightmare

An agonised masterwork about the imaginary paradise of freedom

A War and Peace for the nineties

A great novel which transmits in detail the special qualities of life in a nightmare

An agonised masterwork about the imaginary paradise of freedom

A War and Peace for the nineties

A great novel which transmits in detail the special qualities of life in a nightmare

Books by Ivan Klima

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