All at once an exile memoir, political satire, intellectual freefall through the sky.

Škvorecký follows Danny Smirický, a Czech writer teaching literature in Canada after fleeing the Soviet invasion. The book is structured through his university courses but folds into digressions into jazz, sex, censorship, ideology, and unravelling the absurdities of both communist and Western life.

Škvorecký writes from the position of someone who has lived through totalitarianism but refuses to flatten it into moral theatre. Instead, he lets contradiction sit: the banal alongside the horrific, the comic threaded through the catastrophic. It’s often compared to Kundera, but it’s less polished, more baggy, more alive. A book that trusts the reader to keep up, and rewards it when they do.

1986 Picador paperback (Pan Books). Very good condition for age; light edge wear and slight creasing to covers, interior clean and well-bound.