Lovers for a Day

Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by Booklist as "one of the most important literary voices of Eastern Europe, on a par with Havel, Konrad, and Haraszti." His novels Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light and The Ultimate Intimacy have established him as a writer with a uniquely wry perspective on human affection.In Lovers for a Day, he delivers a beautiful and masterfully crafted collection of short stories on the theme of love. In "Heaven Hell Paradise, " a doctor who has escaped to London comes back to communist Czechoslovakia to be with his lover and realizes too late that he barely knows her. And in "A Baffling Choice, " a young woman begins an affair with an older man who lives in her apartment building, right under the nose of his wife. The dreams and frustrations of the student cafeteria and the turmoil of political exile in the early 1960s evolve into portraits of people struggling with responsibility, fidelity, and absence, haunted by a terrible guilt when their desires begin to become reality. Klima's unique wisdom creates a personal political history of Prague that is an acute and moving examination of our attempts to find freedom in love.