In TIGHTROPE! – A BOHEMIAN TALE an extraordinary, curiously intellectual small girl undertakes the demanding and costly burden of comprehending the world. Her father - a peculiar leftist intellectual, and her mother, a neurotic actress, belonging to an old farming family - are more or less social outcasts, who fight for survival. The situation prevailing in Socialist Eastern Europe in the period after the Second World War - which is both the setting and an inherent part of the fabric of this tale - produces incidents which are funny, cruel, and absurd, eliciting both laughter and compassion. The language of the Czech original is complicated and multileveled, intermixing rural dialect with communist Newspeak, theatre jargon with the lowest proletarian argot; and is lifted by the language of philosophical reflections and poetical associations. This English translation of the second volume of Olga Wallo’s admired novel trilogy based on her own life and times (Spires of the Holy Spirit) will certainly attract international readers and increase knowledge of Czech history and culture.REVIEW: A novel of unexpected originality, exceptional for its remarkably engaging testimony and its uncommonly sophisticated and refined structure and style. That the fateful year of 1948 - after which nothing can happen because everything has already happened (p. 29) - was the year of the author’s birth is symbolic. The novel is set in the 1950s, the time of the author’s and narrator’s childhood, and everything that happens around the child is seen through her eyes. Her entire childhood is strange - matched and in part caused by the strangeness of this tragic and bizarre interlude in our history. Much is concealed in the single sentence: Our estate, the centre of our faith for the future and any retrospective hope. (p. 59) The key to understanding this tale is the deep-rooted trauma arising from the collectivization of a large part of the family property. - Vladimir Karfik, RESPEKT 27, 2-8 July 2007. (From Karfik’s review of Tightrope! A Bohemian Tale as first published in the Czech language.) I believe that all readers, whatever their different cultural experiences, will find in this novel something to identify with, and I hope that, through the personal accounts of the author, they will be able to trace the complex path which our nation travelled not so long ago. - Vaclav Havel Readers who enjoy good prose will find to their liking this imaginatively written and entertaining - but essentially tragic - novel set in the little-known 50s of the last century in Czechoslovakia. - Josef Skvorecky
