Povídky tenorsaxofonisty - CDmp3 (Čte Jan Meduna)

This Czech-language audiobook presents stories written by Josef Škvorecký in the mid-1950s, following Danny Smiřický in Czechoslovakia after 1948, when the hoped-for socialism gives way to a totalitarian regime modelled on the Soviet system. Danny tries to avoid getting involved in anything and devotes himself to his greatest passions, playing the tenor saxophone and pursuing romantic adventures, but life under the watch of the comrades is not always easy. Music and love repeatedly become entangled with politics, whether he is facing criticism from a beautiful American woman or pressure from a friend to emigrate. These personal complications are overshadowed by the dramatic and sometimes tragic fates of people he observes from a distance or hears about. In a society where there are no longer the guilty and the innocent, only those already exposed and those not yet exposed, opportunists and submissive conformists prosper, while honest, sincere and kind people usually come off worst. For every cowardly judge with a rosy face earned through rich food and heavy wine, there is some unfortunate young man sent to prison and branded an enemy of the class, a member of the idle rich or a parasite. Young, beautiful and willing women, meanwhile, find life somewhat easier even under communism, since personnel assessments are one thing, while attractive bodies and eyes are another. The stories are also a revealing document of a difficult period and of the author’s unfulfilled dream of becoming a musician rather than a writer. Some appeared in the collection A Bitter World in 1969, while the complete work was published in 1993 as the final title from the émigré publisher Sixty-Eight Publishers, founded in Toronto by Josef Škvorecký and his wife Zdena Salivarová. In 1994 it was published at home as part of the second volume of Škvorecký’s collected works, Stories About Líza and Young Werther and Other Stories. In the 1990s, Škvorecký adapted the lives of the people portrayed here into the television film script The Little Prague Mata Hari; the story reached television only in 2009 as the film Rhythm on Their Heels, directed by Andrea Sedláčková and starring Vojtěch Dyk and Marika Šoposká. The audiobook contains “Panta rhei”, “Truths”, “Work for the Personnel Men”, “How They Were Caught”, “The Little Prague Mata Hari”, “Well-Vetted Lizetka”, “Krpat’s Blues”, “Richard Kambala’s Bebop”, “Until Death Do Us Part”, “Dialogus de veritate” and an author’s note. It is read by Jan Meduna.