SOURCE: Bradbrook, B. R. Review of Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, by Ivan Klíma. World Literature Today 69, no. 2 (spring 1995): 395.

In the following review, Bradbrook explores how the fall of Communism affected the protagonist in Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light.

“In our literature now we have too many Joyces,” declared the Czech poet Miroslav Holub in an interview in London in March 1995. Although Ivan Klíma's novel Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light does not quite fall into this category, its layered structure of time and place, together with the interweaving of the single episodes, is reminiscent of Joyce; yet the combination of dream and reality has a distinctive, gloomy, Kafkaesque tang. The “dark” period for the TV cameraman Pavel is that dominated by the long-lived communist regime; it is a time during which he can only dream, about his...