SOURCE: “American Themes in The Bride of Texas,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 141–48.

In the following essay, Kosek asserts that Škvorecký's The Bride of Texas is a merging of American and Czechoslovakian themes.

Josef Škvorecký's canon is characterized by a spiritual bond with American culture which, since his youth, has played a major part in his professional and artistic development. His personal fate granted him an experience of the greatest importance for a writer, namely life on two continents and complete familiarity with two cultures. The basic feature of his novels is precisely his ability to let various perspectives confront one another, thus creating the entertaining, realistic surface of his work. From The Cowards to The Bride of Texas, this surface has become increasingly transparent, thus revealing more and more of the depths below. Each single realistic episode has become...