God's Rainbow

By: Jaroslav Durych, David Short (Translator), Rajendra A. Chitnis (Afterword by)

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Hardcover | 15 January 2017 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
140 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
1.87 x 1.36 x 0.25

Hardcover

RRP $41.80

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This is a book about collective guilt, individual fate, and repentance, a tale that explores how we can come to be responsible for crimes we neither directly commit nor have the power to prevent. Set in the Czechoslovakian borderland shortly after WWII amid the sometimes violent expulsion of the regionâs German population, Jaroslav Durychâs poetic, deeply symbolic novel is a literary touchstone for coming to terms with the Czech Republicâs difficult and taboo past of state-sanctioned violence.

A leading Catholic intellectual of the early twentieth century, Durych became a literary and political throwback to the prewar Czechoslovak Republic and faced censorship under the Stalinist regime of the 1950s. As such, he was a man not unfamiliar with the ramifications of a changing society in which the minority becomes the rule-making political authority, only to end up condemned as criminals. Though Durych finished writing Godâs Rainbow in 1955, he could not have hoped to see it published in his lifetime. Released in a still-censored form in 1969, Godâs Rainbow is available here in full for the first time in English.

Industry Reviews

"Durych, one of the leading Czech writers of the twentieth century, wrote God's Rainbow in 1955 and then kept the manuscript under a pile of coal in his cellar. He had miraculously escaped the forced labor meted out to fellow Catholic writers under Stalinism, but the discovery of this neo-baroque text would have sealed his fate. Not only did it preach Christian forgiveness, quote Latin prayers, and allude repeatedly to the Marian cult, Mary Magdalene, Adam and Eve, the devil, hell and damnation, but it also challenged the official silence about post-war atrocities against Bohemian Germans. . . . The current translation by Short, the first to appear in English, is based on the original text and represents a formidable achievement: it deciphers and conveys the beauty of Durych's rich, poetic, and notoriously challenging language. . . . Disturbingly authentic."--Zuzana Slobodova "Times Literary Supplement"

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