On the Sky's Clayey Bottom: Sketches and Happenings from the Years of Silence

These 38 sketches and short stories, subtitled ``Sketches and Happenings from the Years of Silence,'' afford an arresting view of Czechoslovakia before the ``velvet revolution'' of 1989. Urbanek (one of the original signers of Charter 77 and a well-known former dissident) recreates the bitterness and despair, the grayness associated with life behind the Iron Curtain. Although Urbanek's general view of the Czech character is critical, the nation's traumas --the Nazi occupation; a series of repressive Communist postwar dictatorships--give his characters' actions a moral significance and weight they otherwise would not have. Using irony as a means of illumination, Urbanek sets up extreme situations in which people do not acquit themselves well. In one piece, a man who helped send two partisans to their death arranges for a monument to be erected to their heroism when he senses the boost it will give his career. Vivid, often quirky images stand out: the man who postulates that consumers should buy a record of a lively party to play at home and thus save themselves the expense of having guests over; the state security policeman who terrifies a man he mistakenly believes to be an informer; people leaving their homes to aid passengers injured in a bus accident--a noble gesture that turns anarchic when these same people decide to rob the dead of their possessions. Taken as a whole, these pieces render a convincing portrait of lives endured--rather than led--by the Czech people in the not so distant past. (Aug.)