SOURCE: Irvine, David. “The Old Story Served Fresh.” Spectator 280, no. 8839 (3 January 1998): 28-9.

In the following review, Irvine maintains that Klíma undertakes a powerful examination of the nature of love in The Ultimate Intimacy.

In his novel, Love and Garbage, Klima's narrator says on the subject of writing:

I still believe that literature has something in common with hope … I am not greatly attracted to books whose authors merely portray the hopelessness of our existence, despairing of man, of our conditions, despairing over poverty and riches, over the finiteness of life and the transience of feelings. A writer who doesn't know anything else had better keep silent.

The dictum lends itself well to Ivan Klima's latest novel, The Ultimate Intimacy. There is much that is positive in this novel, but little that is unambiguously so.

The novel—a combination of diary, letters and narrative—is couched in Klima's...