PENGUIN CLASSICS : THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK PB B FORMAT – JAROSLAV HASEK-JOSEF LADA-CECIL PARROTT

The inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller s Catch-22, Jaroslav Hasek s black satire The Good Soldier Svejk is translated with an introduction by Cecil Parrott in Penguin Classics. Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army s most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War – although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards, getting drunk and becoming a general nuisance, the resourceful Svejk uses all his natural cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the doctors, police, clergy and officers who chivvy him towards battle. The story of a little man caught in a vast bureaucratic machine, The Good Soldier Svejk combines dazzling wordplay and piercing satire to create a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war. Cecil Parrott s vibrant, unabridged and unbowdlerized translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing Hasek s turbulent life as an anarchist, communist and vagranty, and the Everyman character of Svejk. This edition also includes a guide to Czech names, maps and original illustrations by Josef Ladas. Jaroslav Hasek (1883-1923) Besides this book, the writer wrote more than 2,000 short works, short stories, glosses, sketches, mostly under various pen-names. If you enjoyed The Good Soldier Svejk, you might like Mikhail Bulgakov s The Master and Margarita, also available in Penguin Classics. Brilliant … perhaps the funniest novel ever written George Monbiot Hasek was a comic genius Sunday Times Hasek was a humorist of the highest calibre….A later age will perhaps put him on a level with Cervantes and Rabelais Max Brod