Two novellas about what survives when regimes begin policing pleasure.

Written by Czech émigré novelist Josef Škvorecký, The Bass Saxophone collects Emöke and the title work alongside his autobiographical essay “Red Music”: three pieces joined by jazz, desire, memory and the particular stupidity of authoritarian culture when confronted with anything unruly. Originally written in Czech, the volume was translated into English by Káča Poláčková-Henley.

Emöke follows a young narrator’s encounter with a Hungarian woman whose religious mysticism collides with his own materialism and sexual desire. The title novella moves back into Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, where jazz has been condemned as degenerate and musicians survive through improvisation in both senses of the word. Škvorecký understands jazz not merely as cultural décor but as an alternative political grammar: spontaneous, hybrid, pleasurable, impossible to make behave. His comic instinct keeps the politics from hardening into allegory; ideology appears instead as something grotesquely intimate, entering music, romance, vanity and ordinary conversation.

Picador / Pan Books, 1980. First Picador edition; paperback. Originally published in Czech as Legenda Emöke (1963) and Bassaxofon (1967); English translation first published 1977. Moderate shelf wear and rubbing to covers and edges; age-toning to pages, binding sound.