SOURCE: “The Girl and the Legend: Josef Škvorecký ‘Emöke’ (1980),” in The Achievement of Josef Škvorecký edited by Sam Solecki, University of Toronto Press, 1987, pp. 104–11.

In the following essay, Brink discusses the title character and the unusual structure of Škvorecký's “Emöke.”

The eighty-odd pages of ‘Emöke’ (published originally in Czech in 1963 under the more significant title Legenda Emöke) is an evocation of a week's sojourn, years ago, by the narrator, in some obscure Culture Centre in an anonymous Czech town.

… thirty years old, still single … a guy who didn't believe in anything any more or take anything very seriously, who knew what the world was all about, life, politics, fame and happiness and everything, who was alone, not from incapacity but of necessity, quite successful, with a good salary and reasonable health, for whom life held no surprises and with nothing...