Product Description

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book

Pavel is a middle-aged man, a once-promising, award-winning documentary filmmaker, who is forced to survive by working as a cameraman for the state-run television station under Czechoslovakia's repressive regime. He dreams of one day making a film—a searing portrait of his times—that the authorities would never allow. When the communist regime collapses, Pavel finds himself unprepared for the new world of supposedly unlimited freedom, and unable to make the film he has always wanted to make. His dilemma—that of a man choosing between the ideals and temptations of freedom—informs every sentence of this important novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1691386 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This dark and powerful novel by Czech writer and former dissident Klima (Love and Garbage) follows the life of Pavel Fukova, a cynical cameraman for state-controlled TV in Czechoslovakia circa 1989. Pavel and his cineast buddy, Peter, attempted to flee the country 21 years ago. Since then, Pavel has sacrificed his dreams one by one on the altar of expediency. He thinks up screenplays for movies that will never be made and fantasizes about Alice, the lost love of his life. Every aspect of his life, in fact, is permeated by a moral grubbiness; to wit, he has a longstanding relationship with a woman whose former husband lives one thin wall away. Even the upheaval that unseats the president does nothing to relieve Pavel's lot, because he understands that neither the new powerbrokers nor he himself can forgive his cooperation with the previous regime. Lurking behind Pavel's sad story is Peter, who, after their failed escape attempt, gave up the possibility of a career in film and, in the process, won over Alice. Much of the plot is needlessly elliptical, but Klima's fine prose is as unsettling as his purpose. (The handful of scenes in an acrid explosives factory are so gloomy, they could have been written by Conrad.) Klima may, indeed, be reflecting the Velvet Revolution's darkening heart.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Having spent most of his life out of favor with his country's government, noted Czech author Klima (Judge on Trial, LJ 4/15/93) shows what it's like for everyone-dissident and nondissident alike-to come out on the other side of the revolution. His protagonist, Pavel, who was imprisoned in his youth for attempting to flee beyond the barbed wire to freedom, simply tries to get by working as the cameraman for a TV station. When the Velvet Revolution comes, he finds himself cast in the role of reactionary by the brave new youth of his country and by his friend Peter, with whom he attempted to escape. In the end, freedom is not as good as it looked: power shifts are meaningless, people scramble for economic gain, and a sense of confused uncertainty reigns. "I'm always trying to satisfy the people who make the decisions," concedes Pavel. In taut, uncluttered prose, Klima dispassionately examines the despair of people who have been trying to satisfy others for so long that they no longer know how to find a place for themselves in the world. Highly recommended for literate readers.
Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Klima's latest novel is his most ambitious, and it is about Pavel, a Czechoslovakian television cameraman accustomed to working within the confines of a totalitarian regime headed by a mentally incompetent, psychically mutilated president. Derided by his contemporaries for his capitulation to this system, haunted in midlife by the desire for a child by a lost lover, and burdened by his senile mother, he has longed throughout his career to make the documentary that would tell the uncensored truth about the darkness of his history. But after the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989 and the so-called collapse of Communism, he must act in a new age populated by citizens who as yet are painfully unaware of any limitations in their new "freedom," resembling Nietzsche's "new men," who can only blink, in Zarathustra. Pavel's documentary becomes indefinitely postponed, as does his hope for liberation from commercials, sound bites, and the greatest question of his flesh. Klima's book is both symphonic and cinematographic in form, and devastating in its refusal of faith. Klima, whose work was banned in his native Czechoslovakia until recently, is one of the most important literary voices of eastern Europe, on a par with Havel, Konrad, and Haraszti. Anyone remotely interested in the dislocations of history as well as the moral bankruptcy of the late-twentieth-century "information society" and its clampdown on conscience should read this book. Greg Burkman

Customer Reviews

The Unbearable Emptiness of Being
Ivan Klima's Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light is set in Czechoslovakia in 1989. The old Communist regime, in place since 1948, hangs by a thread as the Velvet Revolution, led by students and dissident writers, such as Vaclav Havel (who went on to become President of the Czech Republic) and Ludvik Vaculik among others grows stronger daily. The novel's protagonist is Pavel Fukova. The story on its surface centers on Pavel's relationship with his old friend Peter, and Alice the girl they both loved. The inner story involves Pavel's apprehension about his own life and future as the long hoped for struggle for freedom races towards the finish line.

Pavel is a news cameraman for the government-run Czech television station, an institution loathed by most Czechs as an instrument of oppression, boring news reports, and propoganda. Pavel took on this job after he and his friend Peter were released from prison after they attempted to flee the country in 1968 after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague spring. (In real life Klima was in the U.S. in August 1968 but choose to return and found his work banned by the Soviet-controlled regime. In fact, Klima repeatedly refused `offers' from the old regime to emigrate. When asked why, he explained that "to be a writer means also to stick up for people whose fate is not a matter of indifference to me"). Pavel realizes that taking on this job may be seen as an implicit acceptance of an oppressive regime but he takes it on while explaining to himself that it will allow him to write screenplays that can be produced once the regime ends. Scenes from his screenplays, almost all autobiographical to a degree are woven into the novel. Peter, upon his release from prison, decided to withdraw from society altogether and winds up as the caretaker of a remote old castle far removed from the political storms that best life in Prague. The core of the novel focuses on the impact those choices have had on Pavel's outward and inward life.

It is hard to explain the impact the novel had on this reader. I was reminded of two things I had learned in my life. As a child taking religious instruction I was taught that a "sacrament was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." In Waiting for the Dark I saw how Pavel's outward and visible compromise with an oppressive regime inexorably led to the diminution if not total elimination of whatever inward and spiritual (not necessarily to be taken in a religious context) grace he possessed in his heady younger days when he loved Alice and made a mad, hopelessly futile dash for freedom with Peter. Peter is scarred inwardly as well, due in part to his insistence on removing himself as far as he could from any outward and visible influences. Peter acknowledges this late in the novel when he turns to Pavel and says, "we are both scarred in our own way."

I was also reminded of the words of the Russian/Soviet writer, Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Oisp Mandelstam. She once said that "a person with inner freedom, memory, and fear is that reed, that twig that changes the direction of a rushing river." What Klima has done here I think is to deal with people, in the form of Pavel, who have made outward compromises with a repressive regime in order supposedly to maintain their inner freedom only to find that those compromises lead to the opposite result. Pavel knows on some conscious level that he is neither a reed or twig that has contributed to the rushing river of freedom. The realization leads to despair, ennui, and ultimately a life not worth living. It is Pavel's awareness of the inner emptiness that gives the novel meaning and poignancy.

The book is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I am a careful reader and despite that fact it sometimes left me confused as Klima jumps from the story to Pavel's screenplay in a manner that often left me scratching my head. I was compelled to re-read a few passages (try) to make sure I understood where Klima was going.

Ultimately, this is a book well worth reading. It caused me to engage in no small amount of self-reflection and for me that alone was worth the `price of admission.

Powerful and insightful
This novel explores the events before and after the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia through the experiences of a photographer. Under Communist rule, he was forced to take artless phtotgraphs for news agencies but had always dreamed of being able to pursue his art and make great films. After the revolution, he may have his chance.

The novel works both as the story of a single man's life and in exploring more generally how Czech society after Communism did and did not live of to the dreams of freedom that its citizens had. There is a safety in unattainable dreams that is no longer there once they are realizable. (Think _The Iceman Cometh_.)

Like Jackie Mason says: "Gorgeous!...Simply gorgeous!" Read this and prepare to be entertained!
You know a book's *that* good when it manages to survive the rigourous process of translation--in Mr. Klima's case, from Czech--into English, yet still retain elements of what made it so goshdarned ab-fab in the vernacular. Ivan Klima--drum roll, please, and preferrably at the Rudolfinum venue in Prague--is rapidly becoming my all-time kick-posterior novelist in this "golden" city. His WAITING FOR THE DARK, WAITING FOR THE LIGHT (WFTD,WFTL) is a fine example of just why he's one of the Czech so-called "Republic's" (<-- what the heck does THAT mean?) pre-eminent scribes. Of course, when people ask me which country Klima hails from, I always respond that he comes from the former Austrian territory once known as "Boehmen" (Bohemia). Any other moniker, incidentally, is totally meaningless and I don't even recognize its alleged sovereignty.

But I digress...

This novel isn't what I'd consider an easy read, by any stretch, mesdames et messieurs (or as we say in the vernacular, "dame a panove"). Even for those of you super swift readers who think you're "all that," one occasionally needs to glance over these various pages a second (and often, third) time because the Klima-ster's thoughts are chewy like a chocolate-y granola bar--but triply as fortifying.

Mr. Ivan Klima isn't at all interested in delivering pithy lines of pulpy drek to a mass audience of daft dolts, even though it's painfully clear to this here 'zon Reviewer (note the capitalized "R," toots!) that the masses would best be served by the prosaic dishings-out of a one, Mr. Klima. Klima goes for the top shelf booze bottles, babies. He aims to stay there.

I've long contemplated over hot cups of espresso served up in cafes nestled in comfortable but dark Prague Inner District alleyways (atop those saintly cobbles) at how Mr. Klima goes about his writerly day. How DOES he manage to build up his scenes or construct his looping and oftentimes intertwining narratives?! Where does the Bohemian phenomenon get his inspiration for some of his more introspective passages?

Surely, his experience as a child survivor of the one and only true Holocaust plays a part. The horrors he witnessed during his hellish soujourn in the Nazi Terezin/Teresienstadt are certainly more than enough trauma to last a human a lifetime, but I've long felt that there's something more at play here, ladies and germs. Mr. Klima's brain works a little differently than the mere mortal, and this perhaps explains away in large part why his many stories are so blimmin' convincing. Pain, in Mr. Klima's case, is the hummus which keeps his lines together.

You realize that I'm not gracing WFTD,WFTL with any particular favouritism (and please add the "u" in this word, you Across the Pond ignoramouses!). I admit that I generally go for all of Mr. Klima's works without any set plan. All of his stuff totally rocks the socks off of what passes for literature in the marketplace, and I challenge any Average Joe (or posterior wipes like B. Andrews) to select any TWO of Klima's works and then come back with some negative feedback.

If you do, you need to go back to school. Or Vancouver.

Klima's stuff is just that good.

Pay special attention, kids, to the gleanings from the immediate pre-1989 period, and note the publication years for some of these books. They're all formerly banned tomes under the "Communist" regime, and you should thank you lucky stars, dance a couple of daily jigs, and be grateful as all get-up that we have a talent such as Ivan Klima. Eat porridge, in celebration of this fact.

Like a finely aged wine, Mr. Klima had to weather the storm of an idiotic administration during the so-called "former" Czechoslovakian Third Republic's experimentation with "Communism" in order to deliver liquid writerly gold under high pressure. Be thankful that we have him. Be thankful that he's teaching us.

I remain, faithfully, his greatest expat fan in Prague,
ADM