A review by eush
Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Mariusz Szczygieł

5.0

Szczygiel is a Pole writing about the old Czechoslovakia (and the present-day Czech Republic), and while I'm not sure about the nuances of that, this is an engaging book about people just trying to live through the — well, Kafkaesque — times they were in, when there's never a list of people whose names you can't say, but you're supposed to intuit it; when the man commissioned to design a gigantic statue of Stalin really, really doesn't want the job but gets it anyway, to his demise; when a writer is imprisoned for 15 months in solitary confinement, only to find that there was never a record of her arrest and is told that she might have just made it up. It's funny, tragic, absurd, and smart, exploring what it's like to live under totalitarianism and the choices, or lack thereof, that people had to make.