SOURCE: Shapiro, Anna. “Garbage to Garbage, Dust to Dust.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (19 May 1991): 3, 10.

In the following review, Shapiro notes a definite American influence in Klíma's Love and Garbage and in Felix Roziner's A Certain Finkelmeyer.

It is odd enough that two novels about Jewish writers living under the thumb of Soviet censorship, each with a wife and two children and a beloved mistress, should appear in this country at the same time, but a more surprising similarity is that both are so strikingly removed in tone from what one thinks of as characteristically Eastern European.

The chilling humor of a Milan Kundera or Josef Skvorecky or the didactic blasts of Solzhenitsyn barely echo. Instead, the Czechoslovakian Ivan Klima's style in Love and Garbage is dreamy and almost submarine, while Felix Roziner in A Certain Finkelmeyer, writing in Russian, is more straightforwardly naturalistic. Each novel, in...