LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC: All About Me, and Julie, and the End of the Great War

by Jan Prochazka ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 1973

As the butt both of the other village boys' cruel pranks and his father's bad temper, puny Olda is used to fighting back against a hostile world and after his family's beloved mare Julie is stolen from him by some German soldiers, Olda wanders through the no-man's land between the retreating Nazis and advancing Russians in a futile attempt to steal a replacement for her. Through Olda's twelve year-old eyes we experience the coarseness and pettiness of his fellow villagers and the random violence of a war in dissolution; there are times when fear shocks him back to childhood memories and other times when immediate problems like holding on to a captured hedgehog make him oblivious to the danger around him. Everything Olda encounters -- from a cigarette case with a pornographic picture (a find he treasures without really knowing what to make of it) to the corpse of a Russian lieutenant who had befriended him -- is seen with startling immediacy. Yet his moments of skepticism and self-mockery are continual reminders that the narrator is a more mature Olda looking back on these days of turmoil from the perspective of the short-lived Republic that followed, and Julie's loss is as much symbolic as personal. Except for the hero's chronological age, nothing in this fine novel makes it uniquely a young person's book, but Olda's spirit does make his encounters with death and irreversible separation from a prized possession humanly bearable if not logically comprehensible.

Pub Date: June 8, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1973

Categories: FICTION