First chapter on little known (in my country these days) company Bata and its founders literally spirited me away. Alas, further chapters were far less captivating. In retrospective it looks like that first chapter didn't belong to the rest of the book, where other stories are mostly homogenious in their tone and meter. The first one surely merits a book of its own.

Très courtes touches, couches, successives, qui désignent, qui dessinent le voisin, le lointain, le souffrant sous le joug. ( )

http://vehesse.free.fr/dotclear/index.php?2013/06/19/2091-gottland-de-mariusz-sz...

Le meilleur livre que j'ai lu ces dernières années — et lu totalement par hasard. Faites-le connaître. Il est à lire en parallèle de 1984 d'Orwell. ( )

In his reportage-style book “Gottland”, Szczygieł, a well-known Polish journalist, makes an attempt to look into Czech history and mentality, bringing to light some interesting facts and stories about the leaders of the Prague Spring, some famous musicians and writers and other common folks. It’s a real eye-opener when it comes to learning the hardships and absurds of living and working under the communist rule, so similar and yet so different to those experienced by the Polish and other eastern European nations. I absolutely loved this book, it was hard to put down, fair play to Szczygieł! ( )

It is a very good, but profoundly depressing book. Apart from an opening essay on Bata – the Czech whose shoes became famous worldwide - it deals with the hardcore communist times in Czechoslovakia. It’s very unsettling to realize the extent of control and terror that the regime had. It eerily reminds one that it was indeed Kafka’s country- ‘where the life of the accused is the crime in itself.’ Szczygiel’s second book on Czechoslovakia, Make Yourself a Paradise, is lighter, the stories are more quirky. The absurdity of the communist system there is a mere absurdity, you don’t feel it as a killing force, whereas here people not only lose their freedom, they lose their sanity or their lives- they are either killed or they kill themselves. ( )