Catapult

Fülszöveg

The sixties were tlie grand time of Czech fiction and Vladimir Párái was one of its brightest stars. In my opinion, Catcipult is Páral at his very best, which means; it's great fiction indeed. —Josef Skvorecky
Párol [is] possibly the best and certainly the most popular writer living in Czechoslovakia today —Times Literary Supplement (1986),
An outstanding grotesque, which causes us to see ourselves in its burning, satirical mirror. —Neues Peutsctiland (New Germany, 1980).
Páral's novels have introduced into Czech fiction a rather unusual narrative dynamism; they ore like whirlwinds, with fragments of recognizable real life spinning around in what eventually emerge as meticulously organized patterns. —Times Literary Supplement [^970].
One thing's for sure: Cotopu/f will soon be sold out, —Nové/cn/h/(New Books, 1967),
Vladimír Páral's Catapult was one of the major literary events of the Prague Spring which preceded the Eastern Bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The sixties were tlie grand time of Czech fiction and Vladimir Párái was one of its brightest stars. In my opinion, Catcipult is Páral at his very best, which means; it's great fiction indeed. —Josef Skvorecky
Párol [is] possibly the best and certainly the most popular writer living in Czechoslovakia today —Times Literary Supplement (1986),
An outstanding grotesque, which causes us to see ourselves in its burning, satirical mirror. —Neues Peutsctiland (New Germany, 1980).
Páral's novels have introduced into Czech fiction a rather unusual narrative dynamism; they ore like whirlwinds, with fragments of recognizable real life spinning around in what eventually emerge as meticulously organized patterns. —Times Literary Supplement [^970].
One thing's for sure: Cotopu/f will soon be sold out, —Nové/cn/h/(New Books, 1967),
Vladimír Páral's Catapult was one of the major literary events of the Prague Spring which preceded the Eastern Bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The picaresque story of an engineer in a state of fundamental ambivalence. Catapult is a great comic novel full of the alienation and absurdities of the work of Franz Kafka and the sardonic burlesque of Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Sct)weik.
Jacek Jost is a 33-year-old engineer with a wife and a little daughter. He takes the train back and forth across Czechoslovakia, from his home plant to the company's headquarters, dreaming about the shore in Yugoslavia. When one day the train comes to a sudden stop, he finds himself catapulted into the arms of the young woman sitting across from him. He continues past his stop to hers, thus breaking his routine and opening up a flood of new experiences, including a series of seven women along his train route, seven potential new careers, seven dreams that could come true if only he could decide and then act on his decision.
The world Catapult depicts is one of schemes and routines, of food and furnishings, with neither spiritual values nor other clues as to which choices to make, Páral's unusually fluid style and driving pace reflect the exhilaration of the Czechs' newly-found freedom, a feeling being felt again in much of Eastern Europe today. But, at every point, the exhilaration is balanced by the pathos of Jacek's, as well as the other characters' inner torment. In a world where everything suddenly seems possible, even resolution turns out to be futile.
Like tl-ie cosmopolitan works of fellow Czechs Kafka, Hasek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera, Páral's Catapult presents, in a most humorous yet compelling fashion, a world that is familiar, and haunting, to us all.
Vladimir Parol is the author of eleven novels; Catapult is his third. Although the novels he published in the 1960s burlesqued and criticized the contemporary world, they were sufficiently apolitical to be published, and they were extremely popular both at home and in translation. Catapult is the first of Páral's novels to be translated into English. It won the award presented by the Czechoslovak Youth League to the best novel of the year.
William Harklns is chairman of the Slavic Languages Department at Columbia University and of the American Committee of Slavists, He has translated Three Comic Poems by A.S. Pushkin, and May by the Czech poet Karel Macha. He is also the author of Karel Capek and the editor of Czech Prose: An Anttiology
Jacket illustration: Detail from a painting by Marcellln DuJour Jacket Design: Stacy Wszola Vissza