The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War - by Jaroslav Hasek (Paperback)

About the Book

"Follows the adventures of Josef éSvejk, a boisterous and sometimes bumbling (or brilliantly subversive?) Czech soldier, as he navigates the trials of World War I. Thrust into the Austro-Hungarian Empire's army in 1914, éSvejk ... embarks on a wild trip through war-ravaged Europe as he fakes illnesses, is captured by his own men, and takes on various quixotic quests to avoid arriving at the front lines, always with a bizarre--and often hilarious--anecdote at the ready"--Back cover.

Book Synopsis

Discover "perhaps the funniest novel ever written" (The Guardian ), now beautifully reissued

"The classic comic novel of the First World War." --The New Yorker - "A literary masterpiece." --New York Review of Books - "One of the greatest works of 20th century literature." --Boston Globe

Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk follows the adventures of Josef Svejk, a boisterous and sometimes bumbling (or brilliantly subversive?) Czech soldier, as he navigates the trials of World War I. Thrust into the Austro-Hungarian Empire's army in 1914, Svejk, "one of the great characters of 20th century literature" (New Republic), embarks on a wild trip through war-ravaged Europe as he fakes illnesses, is captured by his own men, and takes on various quixotic quests to avoid arriving at the front lines, always with a bizarre--and often hilarious--anecdote at the ready. Predating countercultural American classics like Catch-22 by a generation, The Good Soldier Svejk was the first great antiwar satire, and still one of the finest ever written.

Review Quotes

"Hasek was a comic genius." - Sunday Times (London)
"Brilliant. ... Perhaps the funniest novel ever written." - George Monbiot, The Guardian
"The classic comic novel of the First World War." - New Yorker
"[Svejk] is one of the great characters of 20th-century literature. ... [Hasek's] satire on the military combines topicality and timelessness. Above all it captures the flavor of life in early-century Prague. ... Deserves to be relished for its offbeat wisdom. ... Hasek's honesty, clarity of detail, and pawky restraint have made The Good Soldier Svejk a near classic." - New Republic
"[Svejk] is one of the great characters of 20th-century literature. ... [Hasek] captures the flavor of life in early-century Prague. ... Hasek's honesty, clarity of detail, and pawky restraint have made The Good Soldier Svejk a near classic." - New Republic
"All the good adjectives apply to [this novel]: robust, bawdy, sly, hugely comic and astonishingly inventive; it is also singularly undemanding on its readers. ... A very funny novel and a wise one." - Newsweek
"Continues to have an astonishing afterlife. ... Commonly cited as an ancestor of Joseph Heller's Catch-22... [its] continued resonance suggests how deep a nerve Hasek touched. His comic hero highlights the illogic of war so brilliantly that Svejk's character has been absorbed into Western culture." - New York Times
"[A] comic masterpiece. ... Joseph Heller once told [Czech writer Arnost Lustig] at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late Sixties that he could not have written Catch-22 without first reading Hasek's unfinished World War One satire." - Telegraph (UK)
"[A] comic masterpiece." - Telegraph (UK)
"Rich and ranging, endlessly inventive. ... The predicaments of Svejk in an absurd world still continue. And the laughter echoes." - Los Angeles Times
"One of the greatest works of 20th century literature." - Boston Globe
"Without Svejk, Joseph Heller has said, there would have been no Catch-22." - The Guardian
"Joseph Heller's literary predecessor. ... Jaroslav Hasek's classic The Good Soldier Svejk set the bar for 20th-century military satire." - Washington Post
"One of the masterpieces of Czech comic literature." - Time Out
"A literary masterpiece." - New York Review of Books
"Anyone in power, including the president, would benefit from Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, which is set during the First World War in Austria-Hungary. First because it would make them laugh, and then because it is the best antiwar novel I know, hilariously dramatizing the pointlessness of empires and the foolishness of military goals and the sheer absurdity and cruelty of people waging war on each other." - Colm Toibin, The New York Times
"Anyone in power, including the president would benefit from Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk. ... First because it would make them laugh, and then because it is the best antiwar novel I know." - Colm Toibin, New York Times