Word: mnacko
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...TASTE OF POWER by Ladislav Mnacko. 235 pages. Praeger...
Communist treatment of dissenting writers has undeniably improved: in Stalinist times, Isaac Babel was killed; today, the Russian novelist Andrei Sinyavsky is merely in prison. Still, it takes courage for a citizen to criticize a government east of Austria. Czechoslovak Writer Ladislav Mnacko has courage and cunning too. By submitting this scathing dismemberment of the new Communist ruling class to a Viennese publisher, who then sold the rights all over the free world (TIME, March 17), he has blithely ignored the whole machinery of censorship, and so far he has got away with...
...astonished to find that decent people, who were crushed by the little figure in the glass-topped casket, mourn him as well. Blindly, stupidly, they still love him-the discarded wife, the girl friend whose family he once imprisoned, the aging professor whose career he ruined. In fact, Author Mnacko's outrage goes deeper than politics: with Swiftian anger, he condemns the victim as well as the tyrant. As a writer, however, he is no Swift. The novel is at times clumsy and dated: conversations are imagined by the narrator, glances between characters are supposed to be significant enough...
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