The Axe

by Ludvík Vaculík and K.J. Charles

Book Overview

Alongside Kundera's The Joke, The Axe was one of the most influential novels to appear in Czechoslovakia during the cultural awakening of the 1960s.

In late Sixties Czechoslovakia, communist ideology is failing. A disillusioned middle-aged journalist retreats from the politics of Prague to the Moravian countryside of his youth. There he rediscovers the complex relationship with his dead father, a communist crusader. But when the journalist...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810110180
• ISBN13: 9780810110182
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Fathers and Sons, Fathers and Sins

The date is not given. It seems to be around 1960. A man, unnamed, wishes to visit his youngest brother, with whom he has only a distant relationship (he is ten years older than this brother and, from internal clues in the story, the man appears to have been born around 1926, just as the author was). But - metaphorically speaking -- to get to the brother he must proceed through their father, who is dead. And to get to the father, in the sense of knowing him again, of establishing a clear (and fair) picture of him in his own mind, he must revisit the past and in some sense become his father (become both a critic of his father and a devil's advocate for his father). These are the two voices in which the reader is addressed by the anonymous narrator - his own and that of his father as remembered and as re-imagined in a way allowing him to defend himself in the mind of his son. The father was a carpenter by trade and a man who had one big adventure in his life - leaving his wife and four children behind for a year to work in Persia in the 1930's. The family lives in a small Moravian village, unnamed, situated in hilly country along the border with Slovakia. The narrator loved this country as a boy and especially loved the comfortable adventures of woods-trekking, tree-cutting, and apple-stealing that he undertook with his father. The village and its neighboring villages are filled with aunts, uncles and cousins as well as schoolmates and friends. It's idyllic, but a far from perfect place - the narrator remembers injustice and petty class conflict, but it seems manageable, especially by his clever and opinionated father. The world of the narrator's childhood is defined by its local boundaries and local flavor. It seems "timeless" as the world of childhood often does. However, its coziness and even the premises of its existence undergo profound changes during the man's adolescence and adult life - the forced dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the military occupation of Bohemia and Moravia by the Germans establishing a "Protectorate", the war, and the profound changes brought about by the establishment of the new communist government in 1948. The old world is gone and the new one is being built. His father is one of the builders. He has become the chairman of the Party's local council in the village. He's keen on his new role and begins to ride roughshod over local farmers and artisans who resist the changes and who resent being directed to participate in collective enterprises of which they are skeptical. If they refuse they are penalized, not so much by direct punishment as by exclusion from access to decent work and to the normal necessities of life. The man's father applies these harsh measures to old friends and family without exception. It makes for tension and gloominess with his wife and children, even though he explains his ideas of socialist justice and the imperatives of building the new society to them.

Bitter assault on collectivism.

This novel gives a harsh and cynical picture of a population under a collectivist rule: struggle with bureaucracy, incompetence, use of front men, jesuitry and ultimately demoralization and alcoholism.It is a state where people are only happy when they can steal something from the (their) state.The main characters would like to revolt (symbol: the axe raised by the farmer against the civil servants), but they are paralyzed, overwhelmed by a too big power.What is special for this novel is the unrelenting, dark and menacing atmosphere (one feels the disgust of the author in his own stomach).It seems a miracle to me that this work could have been published in his Czech home country under the communist regime.A book to recommend, although happily most of the collectivist states don't exist anymore.