The Bass Saxophone

✍ Scribed by Skvorecky, Josef

• Book ID: 107553343
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 337 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780307832122

✦ Synopsis

The two haunting, poetic novellas that comprise The Bass Saxophonebrilliantly evoke the comedy and sadness of life under the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships. They are prefaced by a remarkable memoir of Skvorecky's jazz-obsessed youth. Jazz is a symbol of freedom in both these novellas.

In Emoke, which is set in the shadow of the Communist regime, jazz becomes the means by which a jaded young man plots the seduction of a mysterious girl enmeshed in superstition and the occult. Spurned, but fascinated, he is drawn into her tortured existence until catapulted into the final bitter comedy.

In The Bass Saxophone a young Czechoslovakian student living under the rule of the Nazis is lured by his love of jazz - the ''forbidden music'' - into secretly and dangerously playing in a German band, with bizarre and unexpected results.

Written with the lyrical intensity of a great jazz performance, these two extraordinary novellas are among Skvorecky's...