Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Capek Reader

by Karel Čapek

Book Overview

Capek's best plays, stories, and columns take us from the social contributions of clumsy people to dramatic meditations on mortality and commitment. The Reader includes a new and, at last, complete... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0945774079
• ISBN13: 9780945774075
• Release Date: February 1990
• Publisher: Catbird Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Great sample of Capek's work

It's great to see Capek's work is still read in other languages. This book is a good mix of his writings along with helpful comments about the works as well as the author himself. It's a bit strange to read it in English after having read it in Czech first, but I still think that even the translated works give the reader a good flavor of Capek's work, his thoughts and literary genius. The book is a sampler of Capek's work. The first section has three works from science and utopia; RUR (the work that introduced the word "robot" to the world), The Makropoulos Secret and Inventions. Second part offers a selection from "The Normal and the Uncanny". Third section is about elusive knowledge and has a variety of short stories and his Apocryphal tales. The one about "The Five Loaves" is a very interesting and a very clever story about bakers, who lived in the time of Jesus and their view of Him. This is truly a great story and a different way to look at Jesus and his times. Part 4 has a variety of tales and works and it's titled "The Measure of Man." Part 5 is called "Toward the Radical Center" and it includes four works; "Let's Be Revolutionary", "Children of the Poor", "The Mother" (this is truly one of Capek's gems) and "At the Crossroads of Europe." These last pieces are some of Capek's great works. For the benefit of the English-speaking reader, not familiar with all of Capek's works I wish it included "Hordubal", which is truly a great piece of literature and Capek's essay "Why I am not a Communist" -- this is an awesome work! Capek wrote up to the outbreak of WWII and much of his work is in reaction to Hitler's nazi machine, which was just getting going at that time. As such, some folks may portray him as a liberal, but this last essay is pretty good picture of Capek's personal philosophy. You can see it on http://capek.misto.cz/, this site has an English section and this essay is translated there. It also has other works that are worth reading. I highly recommend Capek's work to anyone interested in great literature and the evolution of thought in the early 20th century.

Capek's genius

This book is a compillation of some of the greatest works by the brilliant Czech writer Karel Capek. Here there are some of his best-known plays and a selection of tales which can be found entirely and unabridged in "Crossroads" and "Tales from Two Pockets". The plays included are "RUR" (Rossum's Universal Robots), "The Makropulos Secret", Act II of "The Insect Play" and "The Mother"."RUR" is a comical though moving to thought play about the limits of technology from a social and moral point of view, and how men playing God can lead humankind to a complete disaster. However, the play has a happy and very funny end."The Makropulos Secret" is a sort of Faustian comedy which leads to discussion upon immortality and the final conclusion that it's better to remain mortals because nobody could bear immortality's boredom."The Insect Play" (better read it complete) depicts the insects' world as a microcosmos which reproduces human behaviour, greed, powerlust, war, shallowness, every human vice incarnated in insects."The Mother" is related to Capek's increasing worry about war and the rising of totalitarianism.One of the best qualities about Capek, apart from his obvious wit, is that he never moralizes, he takes things from the side of the "ridicule" rather than from a sort of preacher's view. His works are very funny, but no less deep. His sense of humour never conceals the depth of his thought, and humour thus makes things even more serious.

The (almost) forgotten Czech genius

Karel Capek may have won the 1936 Nobel Prize in literature, were it not for his implicitly and at often times explicitly anti-totalitarian views. It is an unspoken truth that the Swedish Nobel Academy feared Hitler's growing regime as much as anybody in Europe... Instead, Mr. Capek died a heartbroken man in 1938, a few months after Britain's Chamberlain handed the writer's beloved Czechoslovakia over to Hitler, in exchange for "peace in Europe." Germany invaded Poland a few months later... Karel Capek was amongst Europe's greatest writers and playwrights during the period between WWI and WWII. His love of mankind and all living creatures is legendary. Few people have ever written with such eloquence, or insight, about matters of eternal significance. It should also be noted that his anti-Utopian play "R.U.R.," which gave birth to the only Czech word in the English language (robot), was offered to the world 9 years before Aldous Huxley's somewhat analogous 1932 "Brave New World." The collection of plays, essays and short stories under review is exceptional. It gives the reader a most enjoyable and poignant introduction to the heart and soul of the Czech people, through the wisdom of their most honorable representative. Arthur Miller's foreword also is a masterpiece...

A superb anthology and gateway into the world of Capek

I found this book (along with other Capek masterpieces) while casually browsing in a Prague bookstore. In short, this book is for anyone who may have heard of Karel Capek and wants to know what exactly makes his fans so captivated about this sadly underrated writer. Containing the full Makropoulos Affair and RUR (the Robot play) scripts as well as numerous shorter articles, stories and anecdotes that leaves one thirsting for more, Toward the Radical Centre offers a nigh complete overview of Capek's opus, clearly demonstrating the man's worldview, which combines a profound commitment to individual freedom and dignity, vigorous resistance to all forms of extremism (whether fascist, socialist AND capitalist) and a deep sensibility to the oft unexpressed facets and quirks of human nature. Capek is the perfect antidote for those trying to make sense of the absurdities of man and is as relevant in today's age of extremes (rabid capitalism, fundamentalist explosions etc) as it was in the 1930s.