In his personal story Pavel Kohout, known best as a playwright …, literally embodies the development of the intellectual core of the Czechoslovak Communist Party from the idealistic and sometimes downright idiotic acceptance of socialism reduced to Stalinist dogma in the fifties (his first poems and plays are an excellent example) to the sophistication of Czechoslovak Marxist thinking of the second half of the sixties (his latest plays amply demonstrate this). White Book is Kohout's first novel….

The author's theatrical experience is clearly noticeable: the book uses techniques essentially similar to those employed by writers who, in the sixties, read their stories from the stages of the "small theatres" of Prague; these "text-appeal" stories too were predominantly satirical, and, more often than not, of an absurdist nature. But White Book is a fine novel, well shaped and absorbing, to which—as to the works of Kafka—history has added...