SOURCE: Bradfield, Scott. “Freefall.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (25 January 1998): 8.

In the following review, Bradfield criticizes The Ultimate Intimacy, arguing that the novel is too long and often repetitive.

In Ivan Klíma's new novel The Ultimate Intimacy, the Communist-free Czech Republic is finally ready to catch up with the fast-track modern world. Skinheads are advocating capital punishment in Prague streets. The health-care system has been privatized into a shambles. And now that freedom of religion is available to everyone, nobody wants to worship anything but money. It's a perilously liberated world in which the old walls are coming down in a torrent of rusty rocks. And the startled citizenry can no longer blame the state of their nation on anyone but themselves.

The Ultimate Intimacy's moody, dutiful protagonist is Daniel Vedra, a Protestant minister who no longer suffers from fears of political persecution and sudden tribunals...