Newsweek, Aug. 13, 1984
Among its many other virtues, The Engineer of Human Souls is perhaps the funniest academic novel since Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man


Quill Quire, May 1984
A complex, challenging analysis of contemporary politics and society, The Engineer of Human Souls will become a milestone in the evolution of world literature


New York Review of Books, Sept. 27, 1984
What better check on general doctrine than the poet's and the novelist's "small stories," the kind that Josef Skvorecky recounts with such verve and generosity


Booklist, Oct. 1, 1984
By turns comic or sad and bitter, Skvorecky's book is a marvelous exploration of the human condition


Library Journal, July 1984
This powerful, moving, yet often hilarious novel is an example of cultural mediation at its best


Canadian Forum, Aug. 1984
A funny, despairing, satirical, compassionate, sprawling, gloomy, provocative, prophetic, angry, and entertaining book. One of the most important novels ever written in Canada


Michael Henry Heim, Nation, Aug. 4, 1984
Skvorecky would probably chide us for dismissing any of the injustices and griefs that abound in [the novel]. They are real and they are gruesome. And yet we put the novel down with a sense of joy at the plentitude of life


New Yorker, Oct. 15, 1984
Skvorecky writes with eloquence and wit. . . . returns again and again to the "traitorous emigrants" in Toronto, a superb Greek chorus that, in spinning its fablelike tales of horror, its harebrained plans for revenge, its thin hopes for the future, forms a jostling, highly diverting Dickensian assemblage of eccentrics, stoics, cripples, beauties, comedians, fools, and mock tragedians


Ernest Gellner, Times Literary Supplement
"Josef Shvorecky is unquestionably an important writer, blending a great humorous talent with a restless, sustained, probing moral inquisitiveness...THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS will certainly introduce the reader to the distinctive Shvorecky world."


Book Description
Fiction/ The expression "the engineer of human souls" is held, by many political indoctrinators, to be Stalin's definition of a writer: as an engineer constructs a machine, so must a writer construct the mind of the New Man. THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As adventuresome, episodic, bawdy, comic, and literary as any novel written in the past twenty-five years, THE ENGINEER is worthy of the subtitle Skvorecky gave it: "An entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, The Working Class, Secret Agents, Love, and Death."


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Czech


Excerpted from The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky and Paul Wilson. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
From Chapter 1: Outside the window, which is high, narrow and gothic, the cold Canadian wind blends two whitenesses: snowflakes sifting down from lowering clouds and snowdust lifted and whirled by the wind from the land stretching southwards to Lake Ontario. The snow swirls through a white wasteland broken only by a fe bare, blackened trees.Edenvale College stands in a wilderness. In a few years the nearby town of Mississauga is expected to swell and envelop the campus with more variety and colour, but for the time being the college stands in a wilderness, two and a half miles from the nearest housing development. The houses there are no longer all alike: people have learned something since George F. Babbit's time. Perhaps it was literature that taught them. Now there are at least four different kinds of bungalow spaced at irregular intervals so that the housing development looks like a Swiss village in one of those highly stylized paintings. It is pretty to look at. But I see it only in my mind's eye, as I look out on the white, cold, windy Canadian landscape. Often, as my thoughts flow, I conjure up again the wonderful things I have seen in this country of cities with no past. Like the Toronto skyline with its black and white skyscrapers, some plated with golden mirrors, thrusting their peaks in to the haze, glowing like burnished chessboards against the evening twilight above the flat Ontario landscape, and beyond them a sun as large as Jupiter and as red as an aniline ruby sinking into the green dusk. God knows why it's so green, but it is. The Toronto skyline is more beautiful to me than the familiar silhouette of Prague Castle. There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one's dreams until some improbable future--a future inexorably shrinking away; where the fear which has pervaded one's life suddenly vanishes because there is nothing to be afraid of. Gone are the fears I shared with my fellows, for although the Party exists here, it has no power as yet. And my personal fears are gone too, for no professional literary critics in Canada will confine me in arbitrary scales of greatness. My novels, published here in Czech by Mrs. Santner's shoestring operation, are widely read by my fellow Czechs but hardly ever reviewed, because there is no one to review them. There are those two or three grateful laymen who lavish praises on them in the emigre press, their flatteries sandwiched between harvest home announcements and ads for Bohemian tripe soup; they are literate, but they do not understand literature. Then there is Professor Koupelna in Saskatchewan. Every once in a while Passer's mail-order firm in Chicago sends him one of my books as a free gift along with his order of homemade jelly and Prague ham. The book arouses a savage and instinctive outrage in the good professor which he mistakes for the spirit of criticism and he fires off a broadside to the journal of the Czechoslovak Society for Arts and Sciences in America. Fortunately, his attack is launched from such a pinnacle of erudition that most Society members find it repellent. And his erudition has so many gaps in it that even those who are not repelled remain unconvinced. I feel wonderful. I feel utterly and dangerously wonderful in this wilderness land.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.

FROM THE CRITICS

Newsweek

Among its many other virtues, The Engineer of Human Souls is perhaps the funniest academic novel since Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man.

The New Yorker

[Skvorecky is] one of the major literary figures of our time . . . a novelist of the first rank . . . one of the masters of current Czech literature. . . . His novels are sad, funny--and utterly gripping."

New York Times Book Review

The Engineer of Human Souls is a deep pleasure to read.

Book World Washington Post

Skvorecky is so much of a writer that the moment he puts pen to paper, he can't help being an artist.—Paul West

Times Literary Supplement

Josef Skvorecky is unquestionably an important writer, blending a great humorous talent with a restless, sustained, probing moral inquisitiveness. . . . The Engineer of Human Souls will certainly introduce the reader to the distinctive Skvorecky world.Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

It is magnificent! . . . It marks an exceptional moment in history. . . . It is a magnum opus. — Milan Kundera