“Immense. . . . Vivid. . . . Brilliant.”
— New York Times, on Durych's "The Descent of the Idol"
“Romance spins a bright thread through the pattern of the grimness of religious fanaticism, petty intrigues of prelates and princes, jealousy of generals, and horrors of the times. . . . Highly dramatic, keyed to the interests of those intelligent readers who like meaty historical fiction.”
— Kirkus Reviews, on Durych's "The Descent of the Idol"
“Durych, one of the leading Czech writers of the twentieth century, wrote God’s Rainbow in 1955 and then kept the manuscript under a pile of coal in his cellar. He had miraculously escaped the forced labor meted out to fellow Catholic writers under Stalinism, but the discovery of this neo-baroque text would have sealed his fate. Not only did it preach Christian forgiveness, quote Latin prayers, and allude repeatedly to the Marian cult, Mary Magdalene, Adam and Eve, the devil, hell and damnation, but it also challenged the official silence about post-war atrocities against Bohemian Germans. . . . The current translation by Short, the first to appear in English, is based on the original text and represents a formidable achievement: it deciphers and conveys the beauty of Durych’s rich, poetic, and notoriously challenging language. . . . Disturbingly authentic.”
— Zuzana Slobodová, Times Literary Supplement
“I’ll go so far as to call Durych a torch-bearer in a time of darkness. If a book about ‘the ramifications of a changing society in which the minority becomes the rule-making political authority’ and its dire consequences doesn’t strike the reader as exigent in 2017, the reader isn’t paying very close attention.”
— M. Bartley Seigel, Words without Borders