Publisher's Synopsis
Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculìk turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction-an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculìk himself described as an amalgam of "hard-boiled documentary" and "magic fiction," while Václav Havel called it "a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity."
A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculìk's masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony-an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.