On the sky's clayey bottom

the long version

Asked to describe the theme of On the Sky's Clayey Bottom, Zdenek Urbanek responded that in one way or another each of the stories in the book describes "the experience of a freely thinking mind inside a country which was, because of the general conditions of the world, compelled to accept a totalitarian regime." Like Havel, Urbanek is an ironist, firmly in the modernist tradition of Kafka. Urbanek writes with deep despair and constant tenderness in equal measure. His. Unerring grasp of life's absurdity marks him as one of Europe's contemporary masters. In these 36 stories, Urbanek's Prague, like Joyce's Dublin, is rendered in exquisite particularity, image by image--from the State Security agent in his "green-gray plastic raincoat," or the old woman leaning against the whitewashed wall of her house at noon mourning the deaths of loved ones to the point of insanity, to the drab apartment of a young couple that have recently committed. Suicide--revealing the strangeness of daily life in this Eastern European city. But unlike Joyce's world, Urbanek's is familiar. It has borne horrible witness to the holocaust and the brutality of the cold war.