This collection of short stories spans fifty years of Skvorecky's life, from his childhood in Nachod to a university in Toronto. Many are related by Skvorecky's fictional counterpart, Danny Smiricky.

Danny traces the destruction of Jewish life in Koslovo, the fictional Nachod. He sees his primary school teacher taken to the camps; a once-respected doctor is unable to practise medicine or even to speak to his former patients; people return from the camps to find that their neighbours deny all knowledge of the valuables left with them for safe keeping; Czech children abuse the Jewish schoolmates who were once their closest friends. Through the years, Danny remembers the Jewish people he once knew.

In "Spectator on a February Night," written in 1948, Danny witnesses the Communist coup. Life under Communism is bleak: intellectuals and liberals like Danny are exiled to remote cities; jazz is banned; Czech patriots are executed; people live sad lives without hope. This is a different Danny Smiricky from the ebullient, sardonic narrator of The Cowards. ( )

The book, like many of his, is semi-autobiographical, with the inimitable Danny Smirecky, jazz-loving cynic and lothario, standing in for Skvorecky. The stories in the book are written over a period of 40 years, and are arranged to reflect the major periods in Skvorecky's life (childhood, Nazi occupation, communist rule, emigration to Canada). Although the stories are not linked by common narrative threads, when put together they clearly read as a sort of autobiography.

There is a huge range of quality to the stories. The ones written about his youth left me worried that Skvorecky was a writer who, while excelling in long prose, hadn't mastered the shorter form. However, as I read on, I was blown away by some of his pieces. The strange juxtaposition of frail, self-interested humanity with earth-shattering events is something he has done brilliantly in novels such as The Cowards. He does this in his short stories with equal deftness. In particular, Smiricky's search for love and sex in an imploding Czechoslavakia, and the Canadian professor's wry observations of his callow students (and himself) were every bit as well done as in his novels. Everything is shot through with a beautifully pitched sense of humour. This was another big plus in Skvorecky's win column for me, and a spur to read even more of his books.