The Argument from Obscurity

Steve Donoghue recommends The Engineer of Human Souls because it’s a great book and because “any mention of Skvorecky will be met with blank stares.” I think there’s something to that:

Our book today is Josef Skvorecky’s rollicking, hilarious, and ultimately extremely touching 1977 novel, The Engineer of Human Souls (in the original Czech – hold onto something now – Pribeh inzenyra lidskych dusi), and I’m taking refuge in it today for two reasons: first, it’s a genuinely great book, endless inventive and sad and funny, certainly Skvorecky’s masterpiece (although all his books are very, very good), and second, because it’s been my experience that if the subject of ‘great 20th century novels’ comes up at a party or a bookstore or a convivial all-you-can-eat hostelry, any mention of Skvorecky will be met with blank stares. Even a recondite cinderblock like The Recognitions (which, don’t mistake me, I also heartily recommend) will have at least one or two heads nodding, but Skvorecky?

More substantively, this offers much reason to pick up a copy:

The book is organized almost entirely around other books, other authors – this is, among all its other virtues, one of the most sustained and stunningly enthusiastic hymns of praise to books and reading you’re ever likely to read (the chapters are titled “Poe,” “Hawthorne,” “Twain,” “Crane,” “Fitzgerald,” “Conrad,” and, wonderfully, “Lovecraft,” and some of the academic comedy here – as Danny must deal with his terminally stupid students – is among the finest such ever written). There are readings of the authors in question – and dozens of others – that you’ll remember forever, but the bookish never upstages the forward-surging tangle of the book’s two plots

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