The Review of Contemporary Fiction

When Eve Was Naked: Stories of a Life’s Journey by Josef Skvorecky´
Richard J. Murphy

Josef Skvorecky´. When Eve Was Naked: Stories of a Life’s Journey. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. 352 pp. $25.00.

This collection includes twenty-four stories drawn from the years 1948 to 1996, gathered in six sections, for example, “Introduction to Life,” “The Evil Empire,” and “All’s Well That Ends Well,” the last focusing on life in exile, the whole tracing the development of the observer/writer that the author became. It surveys the author’s lifework to date and supplies a background for the horrible “short twentieth century” of Mittel Europa’s history. Skvorecky´’s vision of the effect of power on the naked individual, captured beautifully in the title story, carries through the volume, affecting with humor in the fashion of The Good Soldier Schweik and pathos similar to that of The Incredible Lightness of Being. In fact, When Eve Was Naked provides a scrim against which the author’s long list of novels might be read, footlighting that body of work and its characters and situations; it might do the same for the other Czech fiction contemporary to it, especially with regard to situation—life under the Nazi and Stalinist communist regimes. In his preface Skvorecky´ writes that the volume stands in lieu of a memoir prompted by friends. His reasoning: “Even the most nonsensical crime stories and the wildest science fiction/fantasies are permeated with the germs of reality which were part of their authors’ life.” He gives us a paradigm of the vulnerabilities of twentieth-century life, replete with surveillance, displacement, and exile. In so doing, he maintains, perhaps fixes, his reputation as an outstanding figure among other major contemporary Czech authors—Hrabal, Klima, and Kundera—creating a gang of four that can match any in the world. [Richard J. Murphy]