The Cowards

by Josef Škvorecký

Book Overview

Story of an uncomplicated, talented youth caught up in momentous historic events who refuses either to be bored to death by politics - or to lie down and die without a fight. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0141047674
• ISBN13: 9780141047676
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

The farce of patriotism

This is one of the several novels by Joseph Skvorecky which presents the daily life of his alter ego Daniel Smiricky. "The Cowards" is not about coward people, it is about local people in the small town of Kostelec (north Bohemian Nachod)whose aim is to survive living their ordinary lives in the last days of the Nazi Protectorate, seven days of May, from the fourth to the eleventh May 1945. The Germans are quickly withdrawing from the Eastern front as fast as the Red Army advances towards Central Europe, while the people of Kostelec prepare a "revolution" against the Nazi opressors to welcome finally the Soviet troops who will "liberate" them. The main intention of the author, from my point of view, is to remark that both the revolution and the liberation are a complete farce, that History, as written in books, is a great deal of falsified propaganda. Danel Smiricky and his friends of the jazz band are by no means interested in heroic feats nor care about patriotism but about girls and music.But Skvorecky gives a moving view of his characters and events, an intimate vision, tender, dramatic, satyrical, funny, critical, full of humour and nostalgia, as only Czech writers can, because I have always found that Czech writers have the incredible ability to combine the trivial with the deep, the ordinary with the remarkable, the comical with the dramatic, the harsh with the tender.Of course, this novel, being one of the earliest by Skvorecky, lacks the maturity of "The Engineer of Human Souls"; nevertheless, it is worth while to read it and realize that nothing is what it seems and that History is subject to countless manipulations.