Description
Fiction. Music. In HOW HIGH THE MOON a seventeen-year-old Adolf in 1950 Czechoslovakia deals with the growing totalitarian oppression. He loves jazz and Jean Simmons. Nothing he hates more than the Commies who replaced the Nazis after the war. The native sycophants turn out to be more beastly than were the fascist interlopers. Adolf plays blues and boogie-woogie on piano to wall himself off from the obnoxious hammer and sickle apparatchiks. They consider his music counter-revolutionary, undermining the principles of socialism. In 21 chapters of humorous narrative describing his daily struggles we come to understand better the meaning of Sidney Bechet saying: "If you play jazz you cannot lie." Adolf is convinced that he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. The country he set his heart on lies over the ocean where the sound of jazz first emerged. His dream to escape the hellhole he lives in remains a dream until one day, like in some fairy-tale, he boards a train which takes him beyond the Iron Curtain to freedom.
Author Bio
Jiří Klobouk writes fiction, radio plays, poetry, and essays. He discovered jazz when he was twelve and later began to visualize the world around him through a camera lens—he worked in film and television. He created a body of work in which as one critic noted: "We could feel the rhythm and see things from unexpected angles." Klobouk's short stories have appeared in literary periodicals such as Partisan Review, Chicago Review, Artful Dodge and Skidrow Penthouse. "For Winter Wolves," a story published in Mid- American Review, he was named outstanding writer in the 1985-86 Pushcart Prize edition. His list of books includes: My Life with Blondie, Anti-Communist Manifesto (1975), Mostly Beethoven, Radio Plays I, Radio Plays II, Third Wife, JAZZ II:Parents, Music After Midnight and HOW HIGH THE MOON (Rain Mountain Press, 2021).
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA