The Bass Saxophone: A Novella
by Josef Škvorecký
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The two haunting, poetic novellas that comprise "The Bass Saxophone"brilliantly evoke the comedy and sadness of life under the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships. They are prefaced by a remarkable memoir of Skvorecky's jazz-obsessed youth. Jazz is a symbol of freedom in both these novellas. In "Emoke," which is set in the shadow of the Communist regime, jazz becomes the means by which a jaded young man plots the seduction of a mysterious girl enmeshed in superstition and the occult. Spurned, but show more fascinated, he is drawn into her tortured existence until catapulted into the final bitter comedy. In "The Bass Saxophone" a young Czechoslovakian student living under the rule of the Nazis is lured by his love of jazz - the "forbidden music" - into secretly and dangerously playing in a German band, with bizarre and unexpected results. Written with the lyrical intensity of a great jazz performance, these two extraordinary novellas are among Skvorecky's finest works. show lessTags
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The title story "The Bass Saxaphone" is great but my personal favourite is the story "Emoke"....beautifully written.
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Josef Skvorecky was born in Nachod, Czechoslovakia on September 27, 1924. Under Nazi occupation, he was forced to work in an aircraft factory. He later read Philosophy at Charles University in Prague. He worked for the state publishing house, helping to translate books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler. He began to write show more detective stories featuring Lieutenant Boruvka, which became popular with Czech readers. In 1958, his novel The Cowards was published and then banned on the grounds that it was "Titoist and Zionist." He and his wife moved to Canada after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the liberal reforms known as the Prague Spring. They founded 68 Publishers in 1971, which released more than 200 books by exiled Czech authors and those banned by the communists. Skvorecky's other written works include Miss Silver's Past, The Engineer of Human Souls, and The Miracle Game. In 1980, he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He taught at the University of Toronto. He died on January 3, 2012 at the age of 87. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Bass Saxophone: A Novella
- Original title
- Bassaxofon
- Original publication date
- 1977; 1979 (First American Edition) (First American Edition)
- Epigraph
- "But jazz is decadent bourgeois music,"
I was told, for that is what the Soviet Press
had hammered into Russian heads.
"It's my music," I said, "and I wouldn't
give up jazz for a world revolutio... (show all)n."
-- LANGSTON HUGHES
Kreischend zögen die Geier Kreise.
Die riesigen Stȁdte stünden leer.
Die Menschheit lȁg in deh Kordilleren.
Das wüsste dann aber keiner mehr.
-- ERICH KÄSTNER
Give them, O mother of moths and mother of men,
Strength to enter the heavy world again,
For delicate were the moths and badly wanted
Here in a world by mammoth figures haunted!
-- TENNESSE... (show all)E WILLIAMS - Dedication
- TO SÁRA
who knows it all
all too well
TO JOE MEDJUCK
A Friend - First words
- Tonight, Honey and blood.
- Disambiguation notice
- This entry is for the novella "The Bass Saxophone". Please do NOT combine this work with the omnibus publication entitled The Bass Saxophone, which contains this work, the novella “Emöke,” and the introduction "Re... (show all)d Music.”
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, Historical Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 891.8635 — Literature & rhetoric Asian Literature East Indo-European and Celtic literatures West and South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Slovene, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian) Czech Czech fiction 1900–1989
- LCC
- PZ4 .S619734 — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction in English
- BISAC
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- Popularity
- 978,122
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- English, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 2
