Urbanek, Zdenek

New York. 1992. Four Walls Eight Windows. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket . 094142376x. Translated from the Czech by William Harkins. Foreword by Vaclav Havel. 232 pages. hardcover. . keywords: Literature Translated Czech Eastern Europe Prague. FROM THE PUBLISHER - This book is a great event. Zdenek Urbanek's writings about Prague in the recent dark age turn out to be as wise, as sad, as wakeful, as mordant, as great-souled, as the man who wrote them. Urbanek has an uncommon gift for extracting beauty from bleakness. And his moral poise is extraordinary. - Leon Wieseltier. Asked to describe the theme of On the Sky’s Bottom, Zdenek Urbanek responded that in one way or another each of stories in the book describes the experience of a freely thinking mind inside a county which was, because of the general conditions of the world, compelled to accept a totalitarian regime. Like Havel, Urbanek is ironist, firmly in the modernist tradition of Kafka. Urbanek writes with deep despair and constant tenderness in equal measure His unerring grasp of life's absurdity marks him as one of Europe's contemporary masters. In these 36 stories, Urbanek's Prague, like Joyce's Dublin, is rendered in exquisite particularity, image by image - from the State Security agent in his green-gray plastic raincoat, or the old woman leaning against the whitewashed wall of her house at noon mourning the deaths of loved ones to the point of insanity, to the drab apartment of a young couple that have recently committed suicide - revealing the strangeness of daily life in this Eastern European city. But unlike Joyce's world, Urbanek’s is familiar. It has borne horrible witness to the holocaust and the brutality of the cold war. inventory #17137 ISBN: 094142376x.