Word: kostelec
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Dates: during 1984-1984
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...third world that Danny wanders in, lost, is the past. Of his three worlds, what suddenly seems perhaps the most real to him is the town of Kostelec, where he grew up, in love simultaneously with three girls, dreaming of becoming a hero by sabotaging the factory where he worked as a forced laborer for the Nazis...
Skvorecky handles the young Danny with a gentleness that borders on the romantic, but not for long. Juxtaposed with the bygone scenes of adolescence are contemporary letters to the middle-aged Danny that trickle in from his Kostelec friends. Prema, the young resistance fighter, loses his focus after the war and drifts to Australia, dying a pointless death in a hurricane. Rebecca, the idealist, ends up in a kibbutz, shattered and alone after her son is killed by a bomb in an Israeli café. Jan, the poet, remains in Czechoslovakia. Blacklisted into silence, he commits suicide. As a self...
Amid this chaos and despair, the professor irrationally hopes. A mad, glorious scene near the end captures Danny's self-contradiction. At a wedding reception in Toronto, the guests become obsessed with recalling gallows-humor stories about a Kostelec hangman who forced condemned prisoners to shave, and shave again until the blood trickled from their chins as they mustered to face their doom. Then he would shout: "Back to your cells, gentlemen. The execution is postponed...
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