One of my favourite books of recent memory. The story concerns Milan, a young man banned from college in Bratislava by the communist authorities because of his father's politics. Milan engages in a series of dead end menial jobs in hospitals and shops, witnessing firsthand the depressing fragility of humanity and scarcity of moments of beauty in 1980s Slovakia. He finds his own beauty in his girlfriend Tania and his love of running, both of which provide the book with a radiance, but also with its true moments of fear, when it looks possible that he may lose one or the other. Breathtakingly simple, bleakly depressing and beautifully moving on occasions, Milan's thoughts and actions are largely unremarkable, but his search for beauty on the claustrophobic streets of his home town is sad and wonderful in equal measure. One of my favourite reads of this year, without a doubt.

How I wish I could like this book! The author is born in my hometown of Bratislava, at almost the same time as I. He describes surroundings I have walked; his characters have names I am familiar with; they are unmistakably Slovak. The book has an introduction by Vaclav Havel, and blurbs from reputable critical sources. And yet...the book just falls flat. The protagonist is dull. The situations he finds himself in are yawn-inducing. The plot is totally predictable. And the prose is painful. “Passion is a gift, wherever it comes from, and attracts me so strongly perhaps because I have never felt its destructive power. A wave of passion could never wash away those sober thoughts that corrode the brain like poison. Now she was flowing into me through the hot tenderness of her mouth; she was addressing me with the desperate, merciless pressure of her perfect teeth.” (171) Ouch! And this is interspersed with passages of philosophising, with not a spark of originality. The book does show life in Czechoslovakia under communism but there are much superior books, in Czech, showing that much more vividly, with Salivarova’s Summer in Prague just one of many examples. ( )