A Desert in Bohemia

by Jill Paton Walsh

Book Overview

It is 1945. Somewhere in Central Europe, in the aftermath of violence and confusion, a terrified and bloodstained young woman, Eliska, emerges from the forest to take refuge in an apparently abandoned castle. Soon she is joined by others-the idealistic Jiri, the sinister Slavomir and his partisans, and Count Michael Blansky, who is the castle's ancestral owner.But the war has changed things forever. In a storm of ideological change, the existing order...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312262639
• ISBN13: 9780312262631
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful.

I just finished this book and it is absolutely wonderful. It portrays the same event through diffent eyes and times, and the end result is not a grand resolution, but life. I will read this book again.

Brilliant and Moving

I cannot recommend stronly enough Jill Paton Walsh's gripping and edifying novel of communism in Czechoslovakia after WWII "A Desert in Bohemia". It is a "must read" for everyone from age 14 to 94. The strength of the novel derives not just from the historical aspects, but from the nine interwoven characters who are all compelling and haunting.

Impassioned story of life under communism

Jill Paton Walsh's novel about the effect of communism on a small corner of Eastern Europe is structured around nine people encountered at various points in their lives from 1945, when the Russians overran Czechoslovakia, to 1990 and liberation.The first section introduces the primary characters in the midst of the horror, fear and confusion accompanying the Russian liberation and occupation of the country. The eerie, dramatic opening finds Eliska, a terrified young girl, drenched in blood not her own, taking refuge in an aristocratic country house. She discovers an infant girl in a dough trough under the kitchen table. Bread is rising on the table and a milk bottle has been warmed on the stove but no one answers the child's cries of hunger. Eliska takes up the baby and the bottle and ventures hesitantly to explore the house. The place is vast and glittering and grand. And empty. As is the surrounding village; everything left in haste. Eliska milks the cow, chops wood for the fire, bakes the bread, tends the baby.Her precarious idyll ends when a shaken young man with a gun turns up. A country boy turned zealous communist, Jiri is soon followed by a thuggish gang of fellow partisans who arrive moments after the house's owner, Count Michael Blansky, home from the war. Blansky is forced to flee but another wealthy neighbor, factory owner Frantisek Konecny, neither an aristocrat nor a Nazi collaborator, chooses to stay.Walsh picks up each of these lives - and those of the children who follow - in moments of crisis or change as the years pass. She finds Konecny in 1948 as the village attempts to reconcile the habits of country life with communist rule. His factory nationalized, denied university placement because of his background, Konecny becomes a lavatory cleaner until charges of corruption force him to flee. He leaves behind a fiancée who may have been his betrayer and struggles to forge a new life in exile.By 1967, Jiri, married to Eliska and adoptive father of the found baby, Nadezda, has become, in frustration, a dissident. Communism fired his inquiring mind with idealism, now that fire has made him discontent with the slow pace of classless liberation. Sticking to his ideals, Jiri attends a Marxist study group, which, one by one, is carted off to jail or fired or ruined or all three.Count Michael's boy, Pavel, brought up in exile, marries an English woman and feels little connection to his walled-off homeland. He keeps his heritage alive by sending his daughter to spend summers with County Blansky and his sister near the border of their iron-curtained homeland. Kate, entering adolescence, feels only impatience for her relatives' mourning of a bygone birthright. Walsh's compassionate characterizations illuminate the strains of individual lives and the sometimes senseless accommodations made under repression. Jiri, under government orders to produce grain unsuited to the land, purchases the crop to fulfill his quota. The characters are passion

Excellent young adult fiction.

Young adults in search of a captivating but intellectually stimulating book may find this just what they are looking for. Set in a fictional country in middle Europe, somewhere near the Czech-Austrian border, the book includes castles, a prince, a lavish lifestyle from the past, gypsies, escapes, secret passages, a baby of mysterious parentage, and a series of compellingly drawn heroes and heroines bent on righting the world's wrongs while finding personal satisfaction. These characters must deal with the Nazis, the invading Russians, and eventually, the Communist rulers, with the attendant (painfully described) torture, wrongful imprisonment, and human degradation which often follow such political upheavals . Sharply delineated discussions of freedom, responsibility, and power show the various points of view which the nine principal characters represent as they interact at various junctures between 1945 and the present. By the conclusion, which ties up all the loose ends and which will satisfy readers who have identified with the characters, the political movements which have particularly affected countries of middle Europe, such as Czechoslovakia, will be indelibly imprinted in the reader's heart and mind.

Paton Walsh masters historical fiction

I've always been a fan of Jill Paton Walsh's young adult fiction--Goldengrove and Unleaving are brilliant! In Knowledge of Angels, she demonstrated her talent in adult fiction as well. A Desert in Bohemia continues the trend of brilliant fiction. Paton Walsh brilliantly blends the historical setting of Eastern Europe behind the Iron curtain with fictionalized elements. Her use of multiple perspectives gives her narrative an epic scope while still creating rich and full individual characters. A Desert in Bohemia is a wonderful introduction to Jill Paton Walsh's work for those who have never encountered her before and a definite must-read for those who are already fans.