Description
Ivan Klรญma had never imagined that he would become a smuggler. True, there was the example of his father (an academic) who, during the war, had once brought home a roll of banknotes. It was to be secreted in their single room in the Jewish ghetto, and kept from the Nazis at all costs. And there was the historical example of Jiลรญk Vostrรฝ, a Protestant missionary who had smuggled books into Bohemia two and a half centuries earlier. (Klรญma had read the transcripts of his interrogation.) However, though these experiences haunted him, they seemed of limited use when he was being pursued through the streets of Prague, three bags of 'banned' books hidden under a basket of laundry in the back of his car.
But then he had also never imagined that he would be an archaeologist. Or a courier. Or a surveyor's assistant. Or a train driver (though it had been his childhood fantasy). Nevertheless, when in the 1980s he was prevented from publishing his books by the Czech communist government, these were the jobs he found himself having to do.
He used the jobs-his new 'golden trades' to gain access to the secret life of his country (including its toxic forests and its Semtex factory) in the decade that culminated in the Velvet Revolution. And in this the most personal of Klima's books-they become occasions for the trade he does best: story-telling.
ISBN:9780140142228
