Dvorak in Love: A Light-Hearted Dream

by Josef Škvorecký

Book Overview

Here is a wonderfully imagined picture of a little known period in American musical history. In 1892, at the height of his prodigious powers, Antonin Dvorak was persuaded to leave his native Bohemia to come to New York to be director of the National Conservatory for Music. In this exuberant novel, Josef Skvorecky tells the story of Dvorak's utterly requited love affair with young America, the anthem of which is his famous Symphony in E Minor, "From...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393305481
• ISBN13: 9780393305487
• Release Date: May 1988
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

delightful and insightful

Who doesn't like Dvorak's powerful and heart stirring music. This book tries to show the same impact the man made on his family, colleagues and friends. Each chapter could stand on its own,with the characters voicing their thoughts and feelings about Dvorak in their own unique way, both in style and in feeling. I thought the novel expressed the overall feeling of a man of great humanity, humility and almost too ordinary to pay much attention to, while at the same time celebrating his genius. A subtle and insightful novel.

Dvorak in love with America

Probably the highest compliment I can pay to this amazing book is that right after I finished it I started listening to Dvorak nonstop. So many themes are explored here, and each with disarming subtlety. Skvorecky is a musician with the pen.

An absolutely wonderful book

This book is told from the point of view of many different narrators, all of whom have some connection with Dvorak and his American sojourn. Some chapters are virtual novellas, others are just funny stories. As ever, Skvorecky's range is prodigious. He can speak with the voice of Czechs and Americans, men and women, blacks and whites, the old and the young. Dvorak himself is glimpsed only from the outside, by those around him, and it is not necessary to know more about him than that he was a great musician in order to enjoy -- and be moved by -- this comic novel.If the Nobel Prize committee made decisions based on a writer's skill and range and mastery of literary form, Skvorecky would have won years ago. He's without doubt the funniest great writer alive. If you haven't read him yet, you have a treat awaiting you.