Headed for the Blues: A Memoir - Hardcover

Is there a dissident or writer who lived under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia who wasn't a music aficionado? The blues are in the title of novelist Skvorecky's memoir, but it's jazz that gives the book its improvisatory form and its subtext: jazz as a form of inarticulate protest against the overwhelming power of the state. Skvorecky was born in Kostelec in the 1920s, an idyllic time and place from the vantage point of Czechoslovakia's turbulent subsequent history. Skvorecky skips over the map and across the decades to provide this headlong history of his life and times, a history as jumbled and feverish as a sax player's after-midnight solo.

Josef Skvorecky runs a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto.