SOURCE: “Variations on American Themes: The Bride of Texas,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 149–56.

In the following essay, Banerjee analyzes how Škvorecký's immigrant history has affected his presentation of the American experience in The Bride of Texas.

First loves don't just fade away. They usually outlive the significance of the initial object of desire by turning desire into an end in itself. Nostalgia, that passion of memory, proves most powerful when it attaches to an experience of adolescence, as in the case of Josef Škvorecký's infatuation with America. He was sixteen, just like Danny Smiricky in The Cowards (1958), playing tenor saxophone in a jazz band camouflaged as a regular dance orchestra. In Kostelec/Náchod and everywhere else in Nazi-occupied Bohemia, jazz had been outlawed as a racially tainted, debased form of music. But for Danny and his friends, it...