SOURCE: Czerwinski, F. J. Review of Total Fears: Letters to Dubenka, by Bohumil Hrabal. World Literature Today 73, no. 3 (summer 1999): 558.

In the following review, Czerwinski comments on the barely disguised autobiographical elements of Total Fears and declares Hrabal “genius.”

Even during his most serious moments, there is an air of flirtation in Bohumil Hrabal's attitude toward his subject matter. Nowhere is it more apparent than in his comments on his wife Pipsi, “who was so long dying that in the end she became a saint.” Each mention of his wife is accompanied by a tender anecdote or an agonizingly complicated metaphor. As she lay dying, Pipsi was “wound up on to a long, long thread … as if that thread passed through my own heart.” Most surprising is that these protestations of love are directed to another woman: Dubenka (April Gifford), the muse in his later years.

Written during the...