SOURCE: Filkins, Peter. “The Way They Lived.” Partisan Review 60, no. 3 (summer 1993): 487-93.

In the following excerpt, Filkins derides the lack of narrative progression in Love and Garbage.

Halfway through Ivan Klíma's Love and Garbage, the narrator exclaims, “I am not going back and I am not going forward, I am standing in a void, I am standing between two fields, at the meeting point of two calls which intersect each other, I am nailed to the cross, how can I move?” Though this refers specifically to the narrator's inability to choose between his psychiatrist wife Lida and his sculptress lover Daria, it's also a lament about the stasis of life in Czechoslovakia under the old regime, as well as the dead end in which the narrator finds himself as a writer in a society that will not allow his work to be published. Hence, if only to...