Ivan Klima was born in Prague in 1931, in the middle of the Great Depression to a middle-class Jewish family. During the Second World War, he spent three-and-a-half years in concentration camps. In the 1960’s, he was the deputy editor-in-chief of Writer’s Union Weekly, and in 1967, he gave an important speech against censorship at the Writer’s Congress, was expelled from the Communist party and joined Czechoslovakia’s opposition movement. Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Klíma’s books were blacklisted in his home country, but they were translated into several languages and published in 29 countries around the world. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Klíma’s books were rushed into print in Prague and sold hundreds of thousands of copies as people lined up to buy them for the first time in his native language. In 1990, Klíma was elected president of The Czech Republic’s PEN Club. He has written over 20 novels and essay collections, in addition to several plays. His best known books include My Merry Mornings (1985), Love and Garbage (1986), Judge on Trial (1991), My Golden Trades (1992), Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994), and No Saints or Angels (2001).

MY CRAZY CENTURY (November 5, 2013, Grove/Atlantic)

In his long awaited autobiography, Ivan Klima describes his life under two totalitarian regimes: Nazism and Communism. But MY CRAZY CENTURY is more than a memoir. Instead of simply revealing intimate details of his life, Klima uses the occasion to explore the ways in which the insane times he lived in and their dominating ideologies impacted the lives, character, and morality of people.

Klima’s story begins in the 1930s, and concisely captures the atmosphere of the Terezin concentration camp where he was forced to spend almost four years of his childhood. He reveals the way in which the post-war atmosphere supported and encouraged the spread of communist ideology over the next few decades and how an informal movement to change the system developed inside the Party. These political events fed into the author’s personal experiences including the arrest and trial of his father; the early literary revolt of young writers against socialist realism; the author’s journalistic forays into the desolate Czech borderlands whose original inhabitants had been forcibly expelled; travels to the most easterly regions of the republic, where despite the wildly exaggerated propaganda, people were still living in the 18th century; the young author’s first literary success; and his first journey to the free part of Europe, which strengthened his awareness of the colossal lie in whose midst he was still living. Volume Two captures the events of the brief period of liberation during the Prague Spring of 1968, in which the author played an active role, the Soviet invasion which crushed the political reforms, and the rise of the dissident movement. The narrative chapters are each followed by essay-like sections that form an important structural and intellectual element of the book on topics related to social history, political thinking, love and freedom.

MY CRAZY CENTURY was on the bestseller list for many weeks in the Czech Republic and received the prestigious 2010 Magnesia Litera Award in the non-fiction category.

Klima says he was prompted to write MY CRAZY CENTURY because, “I felt it was finally time to examine myself and the times I lived, including the absurd political situations of my era, having lived much of my life without freedom.”