SOURCE: Angier, Carole. “The Old Adam.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 181 (13 December 1991): 37.

In the following review, Angier examines the bleakness of Klíma's world view in Judge on Trial.

Ivan Klíma's superb stories, My First Loves, were published here in 1986. Since then we've had two knife-like novels, A Summer Affair and Love and Garbage, cutting deeply into his twin subjects of politics and love. And now Judge on Trial, which has been considered his masterpiece since it appeared in samizdat form in Czechoslovakia in 1978. It cuts still more deeply, and widely, into the same two diseases; it shows step by step, how a man becomes an ideologue and an adulterer, but cannot bear to go on living in either universe of lies.

Like the dissident hero of Love and Garbage, Adam Kindl has had a tragic wartime childhood in a ghetto-camp from which all his friends were...