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The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)

Josef Škvorecký

Paperback | Pages: 592 pages

Rating: 4.16 | 834 Users | 80 Reviews

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Original Title:	Příběh inženýra lidských duší
ISBN:	1564781992 (ISBN13: 9781564781994)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	Danny Smiřický
Characters:	Danny Smiricky
Literary Awards:	Angelus (2009)

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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. As adventuresome, episodic, bawdy, comic, and literary as any novel written in the past twenty-five years, The Engineer of Human Souls 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."

Details Epithetical Books The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)

Title	:	The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)
Author	:	Josef Škvorecký
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 592 pages
Published	:	February 28th 2000 by Dalkey Archive Press (first published 1977)
Categories	:	Fiction. European Literature. Czech Literature

Rating Epithetical Books The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)

Ratings: 4.16 From 834 Users | 80 Reviews

Assessment Epithetical Books The Engineer of Human Souls (Danny Smiřický)

A swelerting summer delivered me into contact with this tome, in fact I bought it in Bloomington and then collpased into it, the parallel gravity of its temportal tracks swept me along. Sadly, I haven't been able to replicate the effect with other works by Skvorecky.

If you want to read about the Czech post war history- at home and in exile, read this. A great book.Full of humanity. Canadians will like it, too.

One of the best novels I read from some time and though its only February I can safely assume also one of the most valuable reading experience this year. I loved the way it blended absurd with seriousness, nostalgia with grotesque, black humour with hearty laugh, homesickness with plights of life on foreign soil.I liked its structure and polyphonic composition, The Engineer of Human Souls is divided into chapters titled by the names of writers that narrator Danny Smiricky lectures about at

Don't let anything put you off from reading this book. Don't be deterred by its imposing bulk, the author's ominously East European name or the grim title (a quote from Stalin). This a wonderful novel: genuinely funny, with romance, pathos and a fantastic literary nerdiness. Danny Smiricky is a lecturer in American Literature in Toronto. He can smile with jaded amusement at his naive students, as his life travels back in time to his native Czechoslavakia, sabotaging parts for Nazi Messerschmitts

This is a book I have not read for many years, but since it does not have many reviews here, I'd like to add a few words. It is a magnificent novel - complex, readable, nostalgic, irreverent and often funny. Like several of Škvorecký's other books, it is partly a semi-autobiographical rites of passage story about the life of Danny, a young teacher in post-war Czechoslovakia, this one is also partly about his later life in exile in Canada.

A description of this novel can give some idea of the various materials it's woven together from, but won't mention any of the large gallery of riotous, pathetic, human characters. Any book as full as this one -- telling only part of the protagonist's life but suggesting that there's much more; moving through three or more levels of time at once; incorporating the letters of many characters in a way that never feels irrelevant; including, as well, the reading of American literature, illuminated