Ivan Klima has been called a Czech genius by the Los Angeles Times Book
Review. In these stories spanning his long career from the 1960s to the
present, he gives us a gallery of people searching, in love, for escape:
factory girls on their day off and assembly-line workers lost in
Walter-Mittyesque fantasies; a young woman on a honeymoon with the man
she did not marry; a divorce-court judge whose mistress cannot
understand his affection for the routines of his marriage; a young wife
who falls into a passionate affair with an elderly bookbinder crippled
by war. Lovers for a Day is a book stamped with Klima's unique wisdom, a
personal history of a national evolution and an acute and moving
examination of our attempts to find freedom in love. Ivan Klima's view
of love is often witty, sometimes playful, and has a convincing sense of
the erotic....[and] the kindness that can endure between a husband and
wife long after the passion has fled. -- Andrew Miller, The New York
Times Book Review; Klima has evolved differently from his
contemporaries.... Rather than become embittered by his country's past,
Klima has come to a truce with imperfection -- the imperfection of
history and of love. -- Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle