In 1917 Karel Capek got his first job as a journalist and it is fair to say that, while his journalistic prose is invariably artistic, his fiction is frequently journalistic.The compliment could hardly be higher as, according to his 1962 biographer, "the sum total of his journalistic writing . . . embodies the spiritual testament of one of the most humane, civilized, and flexible minds of our century." Capek has an uncanny ability to employ and spoof the techniques of popular journalism while addressing philosophical, scientific, political and social themes. At the same time, he removes these Dostoyevsky-type inquiries from the Grand Inquisitor and, while joyously borrowing from assorted facets of modernist art (e.g. cubism, futurism, expressionism), he repackages them into fables, allegories, fantasies and Utopias.

Stylistically, War with the Newts is again a cocktail—shaken and stirred—of the most diverse elements. This rollicking melange of modes of...