The bride of Texas /

Skvorecky is an ebullient and intelligent writer, and his novels, including the award-winning The Engineer of Human Souls (1984), are lush, entertaining, and wholly original. He was inspired to create this complex, cinematic Civil War story after discovering a cache of memoirs written by Czech veterans who fought for the Union. Intrigued by these gutsy and resilient immigrant soldiers who crossed so many cultural and racial divides, Skvorecky conjured up an elaborate cast of animated and compelling characters, each dramatizing a different aspect of this horrific but world-altering conflict. There's Skvorecky's Czechs, of course, some ribald, others romantic, as well as various historic figures, such as the notorious General William Tecumseh Sherman and the hapless General Ambrose Burnside. We learn Burnside's story from one of Skvorecky's many articulate and captivating narrators, a savvy woman novelist. In fact, all of Skvorecky's women characters are independent and shrewd, including the bride of the title, a Morovian named Lida Toupelik. She and her brother Cyril learn all about the byzantine sexual and racial codes of the South when she seduces a plantation owner and Cyril falls in love with a slave. Skvorecky's amazing swirl of interconnecting anecdotes covers a great deal of emotional and geographic territory while depicting indelible scenes of love, lust, folly, bloodshed, courage, and camaraderie. A colossal feat of imagination and cerebration, this novel is often hilarious and consistently engrossing. (Reviewed December 15, 1995)0679444114Donna Seaman

Toronto-based Czech writer Skvorecky's audacious, romantic, sprawling saga of Czech-Americans fighting and loving in the U.S. Civil War confirms his reputation as a risk-taking novelist. Here, as in Dvorak in Love and The Engineer of Human Souls, he skillfully melds sociopolitical insight, absurdist humor and tragedy. Skvorecky's new heroine, Moravian Lida Toupelik‘her elopement squelched by a father who whips her‘forsakes her Czech lover and migrates, pregnant and disgraced, to Texas, where she foolishly marries Etienne de Ribordeaux, the bourbon-drenched, aristocratic, one-legged son of a plantation owner. Lida's brother Cyril, a soldier (along with many other Czech-Americans) in General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march through the South, has a love affair with Dinah, a free-spirited slave whom Etienne had coerced into having sex years earlier. Around these hothouse parallel romances, which end tragically, Skvorecky re-creates the lives, adventures, homesickness and struggles of a disparate group of Czech-American soldiers who, far from their native land, which was then under Austrian despotism, fought for national unity and the liberation of the slaves. Most of the Czech-born soldiers and civilians portrayed‘in Chicago, New York, Texas, Savannah‘actually lived. Skvorecky inserts well-known historical figures as well, most prominently Sherman, whom the author sympathetically depicts as a patriot who scorched enemy land to shorten the war. Lincoln's hapless General Ambrose Burnside also appears, as does the peace-mongering, anti-abolitionist Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham, arrested by the U.S. Army as a traitor in 1863. Skvorecky's stunning novel shows us the Civil War, race relations, slavery and melting-pot America in a fresh and often startling light. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Skillfully interweaving fact with fiction, Skvorecky (The Republic of Whores, LJ 9/1/94) offers a fresh approach to the Civil War in a richly textured novel inspired by memoirs of Czech soldiers who fought for the Union. The story lays bare the personal battlefields of a group of Czech émigrés who have escaped the oppressive Hapsburg regime only to find themselves enmeshed in the struggle to preserve the American promise of freedom. Key among them are Kapsa, a member of Sherman's staff; Cyril Toupelik, who has lost his heart to a woman of color; and Lida, Cyril's sister, the "Bride of Texas." As their relentless search for happiness unfolds against the even stormier backdrop of civil strife, readers not interested in military tactics or battle accounts may find some of the tale cumbersome. However, Skvorecky's technique of moving randomly from one character to another, letting their thoughts flow through time and breaking them off in mid-flight, creates a tantalizingly complex plot. Highly recommended wherever serious historical fiction is appreciated.-Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An absorbing saga of the American Civil War--and a stunning departure for its Czechoslovakian-born (now Canadian) author (Dvorak in Love, 1987, etc.). The story begins in Savannah, Georgia, with the marriage of a young officer in General Sherman's Union Army to Lida Toupelik, a Moravian immigrant whose sensuous beauty had bewitched several men on two continents before and after her family's escape from political repression in their homeland. Meanwhile, in the comparative safety of their new country, Lida's brother, Cyril, becomes dedicated to a new battle for freedom. In a series of colorful parallel narratives, kvoreck deftly juggles the stories of Cyril's frustrated romance with a beautiful mulatto slave girl; Lida's continuing enslavement of and by men; Sherman's march south, burning everything behind him; the checkered career of Union general Ambrose Burnside, reviled as the architect of his troops' disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg (though, in kvoreck's portrayal, Burnside is simply an unlucky man of both principle and cunning); the life of intelligent, ironical ``Laura A. Lee,'' a pseudonymous popular author of light romantic novels who will love Ambrose Burnside all her life but, for her own intricate reasons, refuse to marry him; and--most strikingly--the adventures, memories, fantasies (printed in italicized sections) of the Czech immigrants who were soldiers in Sherman's 26th Wisconsin Battalion. This is a dauntingly ambitious tale, crammed with convincing period detail skillfully integrated into a generous narrative that, somehow, never flags despite its fragmentation and its imposing overload of information. kvoreck does not eschew melodrama (the reader will be reminded, more than once, of Gone With the Wind), and his trademark ribald humor is much--perhaps overmuch--in evidence. But his big book's boldly drawn characters and passionate delineation of their conflicting quests give it a genuinely epic flow and feel. Easily the best novel kvoreck has yet written, and a likely commercial as well as critical success.