Bliss Was It in Bohemia

A wildly comic story about the fate of a Czech family from the 1960s onwards. At turns humorous, ironic, and sentimental, an engaging portrait of their attempts to flee from history (meaning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia) - or at least to ignore it as long as possible. The author depicts his parents' life stories and also his own adolescence with humorous hyperbole. The account focuses on the difficulties of the father, an idiosyncratic workaholic whose efforts to protect his family regularly involve losing his dignity. At the same time, the extraordinarily gifted Kvido, an aspiring writer, narrates his own teenage troubles, in a world that is not of his own choosing.