Judge on Trial

First published underground in Czechoslovakia in 1978, this semi-autobiographical novel was reworked by Klima ( Love and Garbage ) in 1986 to include significant incidents from his own past. These key additions--brutally honest, emotional, reflective--have turned a political novel into a major opus. Like the author, the narrator is a Nazi concentration camp survivor and an intellectual who rethought his initial support of socalism after the show trials of the '50s and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As the novel opens in the early '70s, respected judge Adam Kindl reluctantly prepares to hear a case involving a senseless murder--but it is a setup. Kindl, opposed to capital punishment, is expected to deliver a death sentence; if he does not, he will be forced to leave his position. A series of flashbacks--to a horrific childhood, concentration camp scenes, the political imprisonment of his father, his struggle with socialism--contrasts with an increasingly chaotic present, in which the loss of friends and a disintegrating marriage are elements. The thorny judicial problem faced by Kindl serves as apt metaphor for the conflicting demands of conscience and pragmatism during the years of communist domination in Eastern Europe. This complex, absorbing novel rivals any Czech literature about the period. (Apr.)