Lovers for a day

by Ivan Klíma

"In these stories, the dreams and frustrations of students and factory workers living under the totalitarianism of the 1960s evolve into portraits of people in the 1990s, struggling with responsibility, fidelity, and absence, haunted by a terrible guilt when their desires become reality. In "Honeymoon," a recently married woman goes on a honeymoon trip with a man who is not her husband. In "Heaven, Hell, Paradise," a doctor who has escaped communist Czechoslovakia sacrifices that freedom to return and be with the woman he loves - realizing too late that they do not really know each other. "Uranus in the House of Death," a contemporary story, displays Klima's dry wit as a vain theater director, set to fly to Australia for a conference and a little womanizing, dissolves in doubt when his lover's astrologer predicts a plane crash. And in "A Baffling Choice," a young wife, haunted by her generation's petty foibles, begins an affair with an elderly bookbinder who lives in her apartment buil