Catapult [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Vladimír Páral came to literature in the mid-1960s, a time of great promise and development in Czechoslovak culture, early in the Prague Spring that would end in 1968. It was a time when a whole generation of young Czech writers were reaching maturity: Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Ludvik Vaculik, and Ladi-slav Fuks. Páral's finest novel. Catapult, published in 1967, was greeted by both the critics and his fellow countrymen as a masterpiece, one in certain ways emblematic of the Prague Spring itself. Catapult is a parodie exposé of Eastern European socialism, of wasted economic potential, of a lazy and self-indulgent marragerial class to which the novel's hero belongs, and of indifference to Marxist ideology. But Jacek Jost, the book's central figure, is much more than just a "drop-out" from socialism. His literary roots go back to mythic figures such as Don Juan, the bored lover whose desires can never be sated, and Faust, the man of science vv^hose thirst for knowledge and experience can never be slaked. Jacek, however, lacks the spiritual stamina of his two prototypes; it is this failure—a comic failure born of inadequacy—that makes him a true child of our century. Jacek Jost is neurotic, a man who can conceive goals and quests w^ithout number yet cannot fulfill a single one. But Jacek the neurotic competes with another, a fantastic Jacek, a paragon of smoothness and competence, who gives the appearance of surmounting every difficulty without effort, often even against his own wishes. This latter quality makes him a picaresque hero and this story of a journey to nowhere and back and forth again, a picaresque novel. In the end, however, the delicate