Josef Škvorecký is one of the great Czech writers of the cruel post-war Communist years, His new book Headed for the Blues does not disappoint. Subtitled ‘a memoir with ten stories,’ it is in fact several. All, of course, describe aspects of the grim dogmas that descended on Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation of 1945, the Soviet-inspired Communist coup of 1948, and the 20 years of Stalinist and post-Stalinist dictatorship which followed until the brief sprint towards ‘socialism with a human face’ led by Alexander Dubcek in 1968, which ended with the Soviet invasion, renewed occupation and 20 more years of dictatorship even more depressing than the first, which only ended after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The first half of the book tells in impressionistic, biting, angry form his own Bohemian story and the stories of his friends as they struggled to remain true to at least themselves (some of them, anyway) and yet to survive, if not prosper, in the so-called proletarian state. The theme of the entire book is survival—the deals and the compromises it takes to stay alive, and to try to keep sanity, if not morality, alive.

In the 10 ‘Tenor Saxophonist's Stories’ he develops rather more fully some of the characters and the dilemmas that people his past and his imagination:

There are various reasons why people become ‘progressive’. Some do it out of hunger and misery. Others, out of intellectual convictions. Some do it for the sake of their careers. And some, because they shit in their pants.

Among those who do is ‘Madame Editor,’ a female version of the vicar of Bray—a prim and very conservative writer in the early Forties, who then became a Catholic apologist after the war who believed in miracles and was shocked when a drunken Communist journalist groped her and clearly ‘wanted me to do his bidding! … that's bolshevism for you.’

After the Communists took power, she was thrown off her paper and given a job in a factory where she slowly began to understand the merits of the workers' and peasants' society and set up house with the foreman, and was then seen sporting a five-point red star on her dress, and lecturing ‘comrade’ workers on how to behave.

There is Judge Bohadlo, a self-satisfied gourmand who decides to become a Communist in 1948 because ‘someone's got to stick it out, to save what can be saved.’ In private he kept on cursing Communism, but then went to public meetings where he would excoriate the capitalists. The Communists went on promoting him—until he died of a stroke. Death, writes Škvorecký, is still the best Political Inspector.

The most charming tale is ‘The Well Screened Lizette,’ a ‘snake in the grass’. Škvorecký's young hero, the saxophonist, was sacked from university because he played jazz and was therefore suspected of Western sympathies. ‘Like a bloody fool, I turned up at the screening session in colored socks.’ That was really suspicious to Fendrych, ‘the cross-eyed political inspector with buck teeth.’ He stared at them every time he asked an important question such as, ‘Are you descended from the working class, colleague?’

Lizette, on the other hand, did no work and understood nothing, except how to operate the system. She lowered her eyelids and pushed out her bosom and was constantly promoted by the desperate men to whom she promised sex (she rarely delivered) becoming a renowned ‘expert’ on Old Church Slavonic, and then philology and then Marxism—none of which she knew anything about.

She was presented as ‘a typical socialist woman of our day,’ and sent abroad to lecture on the achievements of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. After meeting a man from the Foreign Ministry, ‘she was named cultural attache in Rio de Janeiro, in place of a fellow named Hrubes who has been studying Portuguese for five years in expectation of the assignment … I expect one day she'll become the first woman President of this country. And then at last we'll have real socialism.’

In a story written in the early Fifties, before de-Stalinisation relaxed the rules a little, the saxophonist is alarmed when an old friend called Dunca, who has been in trouble with the police, who has been to the West and comes back, asks to come and stay with him. They sit up all night and Dunca tries to persuade the tenor sax to come to the West with him; he refuses. Dunca says, ‘Believe me, a piece of cake. No crawling on our bellies, no cutting of barbed wire. A big shot in the border guards is with us. It'll be like a stroll along the Moldau.’

Dunca, the tenor sax's conscience, says of the party apparatchiks: ‘All they'll ever accomplish is to eliminate hunger, maybe, and maybe they'll even play Beethoven, but you can bet they won't produce any new Beethovens. And if by some error of planning one were to appear, they'd make sure he wrote odes to the Party rather than odes to joy. Is this bunch of bastards going to save the world? At best they'll turn the world into a well fed prison. But of course, for you, a full stomach is the highest possible value.’

The tenor sax admires Dunca's courage and watches the newspaper for his expected arrest. ‘So that's the story. I play the sax, and continue living here. I don't want to get involved … Pilate, that's me.’ And most other people too—how else could they continue? Škvorecký conveys beautifully the shadowlands of life under the long dreary, frightening and destructive years of ‘dictatorship of the people,’ years which destroyed the lives of an entire generation across Europe.