SOURCE: Levi, Jonathan. “The Poetry of Waiting.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (5 September 1999): 2.

In the following review, Levi examines the stories in Lovers for a Day, commenting that Klíma's earliest stories are the strongest in the collection.

Waiting. In a century that has given birth to more utopias and more graves than any other, is there a word that describes better the state of man? Is there a more active word to describe man's activity (perhaps, following Beckett, man's only activity) or man's hope?

The Czech writer Ivan Klíma is best known in this country for his novel Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, the story of Czechoslovakia's passage through the Velvet Revolution of 1989, from a Communist past to an uncertain future. Klíma films the book through the eyes of Pavel, a cameraman for the party's television station, a man of dreams who...