Engineer of Human Souls
SynopsisPlot
As the novel begins, Danny is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.
Story
About this book
Engineer of Human Souls follows Danny Smiricky, a Czech novelist who has emigrated to Canada and now teaches American literature at a college in Toronto. The story moves between his present life in academia and his past in Czechoslovakia, where he lived through the Nazi occupation and later the Communist regime. Danny finds himself disconnected from his young Canadian students, who have little frame of reference for the political realities he carries with him. At the same time, agents of the Czech secret police continue to shadow him even in exile.
The novel's structure is layered and nonlinear. Danny shifts between identities and time periods, sometimes by choice and sometimes because history has assigned him a role he did not ask for. Skvorecky pairs this fragmented storytelling with a comic tone, finding dark humor in bureaucratic absurdity and the gaps between cultures. Each chapter is loosely organized around a different American author, linking Danny's teaching life to broader questions about literature, freedom, and displacement.
Skvorecky himself emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Canada in 1969, and the novel draws on that parallel without collapsing the distance between author and character. The Toronto setting grounds the story in a specific immigrant experience within a cold-war context.
