As Cabrera Infante has lately done with Cubans, and Salman Rushdie with Pakistanis, so does Skvorecky with Czechs in this enormously disillusioned, constantly readable, and buoyantly happy/sad novel: a picture of temporary nationalism (embodied in this case by immigrants) that captures the particular genius of a people who've come through terrible history with the help of luminous personal gaiety. The protagonist of Skvorecky's book is Daniel Smiricky - like his creator a Czech-immigrant novelist who fled his homeland after the Russian 1968 invasion and who now teaches English literature at a Toronto university. Is this closeness of author and hero a distraction? No - because Skvorecky has more important things to do than put a lot of elaborate distance between himself and his alter-ego.