Two murders in my double life: A crime novel in two interlocking movements

In Skvorecky`s first fictional work in English, the narrator lives with amused resignation in two worlds. His life with a group of his old friends, all exiles or emigres from the same country - "the country where we used to live" - is full of nostalgia, old feuds, loves, gossip, treacherous betrayals and friendships that have lasted through wars and revolutions. The narrator`s life is all the more poignantly steeped in the past because his wife, Sidonia, devotes all her energy, time and love to her publishing house and the publication of the suppressed literature of her native country. The narrator`s other, entirely separate, life is lived in the pleasant, pampered, fatuously self-congratulatory world of a modern Canadian university, a world in which grave attention is given to matters such as whether a certain male professor has left his office door wide open enough while interviewing a female student. Murder suddenly intrudes upon both of these worlds. The murder in the academic world is a parody of a detective novel. Cleverly mocking the jaunty insouciant tone of the genre, it features a beauty queen, professorial jealousies and a neat conclusion. The murder in the narrator`s other life is a tragedy, in which an evil web of lies works insidiously to entangle its victim. The shocking conclusion is anything but neat. This is a brilliantly stylish tour de force, in which the bright, sarcastic comedy of one tale sharply contrasts with the dark, elegiac bitterness of the other. A strikingly original book.