Judge On Trial
After the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, Adam Kindl, a judge with dissident connections, is assigned a difficult case selected to test his loyalty
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From one of Eastern Europe's most brilliant contemporary writers, a magnificent epic novel set in Prague after the Soviet invasion.In one of the city's working-class districts, a landlady and her granddaughter have been found gassed. Their lodger, a pathetic mess of a man with a record of petty felonies and psychiatric disorders, has been arrested and has confessed to the murders. The death penalty is to be invoked, and Adam Kindl has been designated as the judge who will conduct the proceedings. The authorities, for unfathomable reasons of their own, have allowed Kindl to continue in his post, though in his uninhibited way he is as compromised by the events of 1968 as are his dissident friends. Now, however, when he is given an emotional powerhouse of a case to try, and is flooded with painful memories of his childhood in a concentration camp, Kindl's conscience cannot remain unscathed, and it becomes clear that it is his own trial that will be taking place, in more ways than one. Early in his career, Kindl had called for repeal of the death penalty. No longer a party member, and fully cognizant that his allegiance to the official party line is increasingly in question, Kindl gradually becomes aware that he himself is being forced into the spotlight, and that the imminent trial is one in which - being as much a defendant as a judge - he will have to submit totally to the will of the party or risk the ruin of his career.As Kindl takes stock of the growing contradictions of his family and love life - evoked here with Klima's characteristic wit and passion - he wonders what chance he has in the face of his steadily increasing inner turmoil.First published underground in Prague in 1978 and then reworked by the author in 1986, Judge on Trial is generally regarded as Klima's masterpiece. It is a novel that echoes Kafka and Dostoevsky, but as a portrait of a man and his times it is startlingly original. As he sets forth the dynamics of Kindl's fate, Klima presents a vivid and unforgettable picture of a generation compelled to witness the dissolution of its ideals. Gripping, trenchant, and rich in its interweaving of the personal and the political, Judge on Trial is a dazzling and haunting exploration of Czech history through the eyes of a flawed judge administering flawed justice.
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