The Good Soldier Svejk

Wonderful to be able to buy this book again. A very amusing book.

This book ia a rambling account of Svejk, a Czech underling who enlisted in the Austro Hungarian army in the 1st world war as the batman of a lieutenant, and his adventures while en route to the battle front. Rather in the same vein as Tom Jones i.e. the picaresque tradition of English novels. While full of hilarious and improbable incidents described tongue in cheek and sprinkled with profanities and sexual encounters,it tends to drag a bit after some time, the incidents becoming predictable and repetative. Difficult to finish at one go. The underlying anti-war values and ultimate futility of war portrayed are for all times though.

Jaroslav Hasek är evigt okonstlat oetisk, jordnära jovial och tecknande tärande - väl värd läsning till öl på U Kalicha i Prag...

I read 'The Good Soldier Svejk" as a teenager. I grew up in the working class section of a university town in Canada. The daughter of the family who ran a corner store near my house took it upon herself to elevate the books offered on the rack in her store. The distributor who stocked it was of the opinion that a working-class neighbourhood need only be supplied with an adequate supply of pulp novels. She believed that the neighbourhood could support that sale of books with more literary quality. As a result, I was able to buy Svejk along with "the Master and Margarita" along with other novels. I was entirely naive about these novels. I had never heard of them. However, some of them made a deep impression on me and Svejk was one of these. It was the funniest novel that I had ever read, and I had read some of Mark Twain. Even then I knew that there was more to the novel than just some very funny satire. It was a novel that stuck with me through my life until I re-read it this time at 70 - over 50 years. Imagine my surprise then when I received the novel from Amazon. I remembered something of a short book. I did not expect a 752 page tome. I was not surprised to read in the forward to this edition that the previous translation had been greatly abridged and expurgated. However, I was surprised when I read the book that this was not the Svejk that I remembered from my teenage experience all of those years ago. That Svejk was ambiguous. The reader did not know if Svejk was an idiot or not. I though that that ambiguity was a masterful feature of the novel but apparently this ambiguity was a choice not of the author Hasek but of the translator. The Svejk of this edition is quite different from the Svejk of that long-ago book that I bought at the corner store. The novel is still the funniest book that I ever read. The Svejk character is still outstanding. it is still a satire of the highest order, but it is quite a different novel. Svejk is a satire on the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its military during its last years before its destruction in WW1. It moves beyond that in being a satire on all organizations in that they are not things in themselves but are constituted of people who each have their own self-serving interests who each try to use the organization’s ideals to suit their own purposes. Svejk responds to the idiocy of the organization with idiocy of himself. He provides convincing proof of his own idiocy by strongly affirming strict adherence to the ideals of the empire. Nothing can convince other members of the organization of his idiocy. This must be a common experience of all those who have belonged to a large organization. The problems of the organization are clear. The solutions to those problems are at hand and well known. Yet the organization is paralyzed and acts collectively against its own best interests. It cannot overcome the entrenched interests of those who have pledged to serve it. It members sabotage its own efforts to correct itself. The book is riotously funny. It is deeply insightful. It is a true work of art.

Definitely worth buying - if only for the introduction. To me this served as very useful additional background info to the German translations I read before.