SOURCE: “Telling the Truth: The Novels of Josef Škvorecký,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 101, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 107–15.

In the following essay, Galligan provides an overview of Škvorecký's work and discusses how censorship affected some of his novels.

I have tried, I really have tried, to read and admire the novels that you are supposed to have read and admired in the last twenty years or so, but with a few stray exceptions I can't quite make it. Saul Bellow seemed downhill all the way after Augie March, which hadn't struck me as that high a hill in the first place; about fifty pages into Mr. Sammler's Planet I gagged, permanently as it turns out. I hung in there a good deal of the way with John Updike, but I finally had to admit that his prose style, his eroticism, and his religiosity were all too fancy...