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Loading... The Memo (edition 2012)by Václav Havel, Paul Wilson (Translator), Edward Einhorn (Introduction)
Work InformationThe Memorandum by Václav Havel
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. read this ages ago, and on the re-read skimmed. In his introduction, Tom Stoppard says that in the play's Newspeak Ptydepe, a more frequently used word has fewer letter than a less frequently used one, and that the word for "wombat" therefore has 319 letters. You know what that means? That Prague's problems could be solved if it had more wombats. And really, the same could be said for anywhere. no reviews | add a review
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Václav Havel, one of Czechoslovakia's great playwrights and a renowned political maverick, received international attention in the summer of 1979 when he and other "dissidents" were imprisoned by Czech authorities. The Memorandum, written and performed during Czechoslovakia's era of relative political freedom in the 1960s, is a provocative and witty assault on the madness of "efficiency" peculiar to total bureaucracy. In a large office, and unknown to the Managing Director, a new language called "Ptydepe" is installed as the official means of inter-office communication, despite the fact that it is known to only a handful of people, that only the most resolute can learn it, and that it is, when learned, almost impossible to use. The Memorandum was first produced in the country by Joseph Papp in 1968, and received wide critical acclaim, including the 1967-8 Obie Award for Best Foreign Play. -- Provided by publisher. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.8625Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages West and South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Slovene, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian) Czech Czech drama 1900–1989LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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