War with the Newts

by Karel Capek, David Wyllie (Translator)

Overview

Working in the 'fantastic' satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut, Capek chronicles the discovery of a colony of highly intelligent giant salamanders off the coast of an Indonesian island.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781515137672
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	07/19/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

KAREL ČAPEK (1890-1938) is one of the great Czechoslovak writers of the twentieth century.

What People are Saying About This

Kurt Vonnegut

God bless Catbird Press for calling the attention of Americans to a great writer of the past who speaks to the present in a voice brilliant, clear, honorable, blackly funny, and prophetic.

Arthur Miller

It is time to read Capek again for his insouciant laughter, and the anguish of human blindness that lies beneath it.

Milan Kundera

War with the Newts will never fall into oblivion....Capek is perhaps the first European writer whose novels anticipated the gruesome vision of a totalitarian world.

Editorial Reviews

Issued to celebrate the centennial of Capek's birth, these three volumes testify to the versatility and timeless appeal of one of the first Czech writers to achieve world acclaim. Toward the Radical Center contains, in new or revised translations, a selection of Capek's charming short stories, essays, and travel sketches, as well as four of his major plays, including R.U.R. , a brilliant drama about the destruction of humankind by artificial people, Rossum's Universal Robots. The dangers of runaway technology, militarism, and greed are further explored in Capek's hilarious satire, War with the Newts. When Captain van Toch discovers giant, intelligent newts on a remote island off Sumatra, he teaches them to use knives to find food, fight off sharks, and collect pearls for him. When he dies, his partners turn his friendly venture into a huge international business with the newts (rapidly growing in numbers) and with the tools and supplies for them. The newts are taught to read, to build massive underwater projects, and to protect the shores of the countries that bought them. They become an essential and powerful part of the industrial machine, and thus warnings about their potential danger to humankind go unheeded. In the end the newts start to blow up continents to create new shores for themselves, while governments argue impotently. Issued in a new, vibrant translation, this immensely entertaining novel has lost none of its relevance and spark. Considered Capek's masterpiece, the trilogy Three Novels explores the plurality of a man and his life, the impossibility of understanding all facets of truth. In Hordubal, events leading to the murder of a brooding, solitary farmer in a small Carpathian village are presented from the perspective of the victim, the villagers, and the police. Although Hordubal's wife and her lover are convicted, their motives and actions, as well as Hordubal's, remain partly mysterious. Meteor concerns an unknown, unconscious man brought into a hospital after a plane crash and attempts by a nurse, poet, and clairvoyant to penetrate the mystery of his life. The stories they derive are convincing and at points they converge, yet the real truth cannot be known. In An Ordinary Life , a retired railway official's attempt to examine his life reveals powerful and complex aspects of his personality that have shaped his seemingly ordinary life. If you must choose, select War with the Newts , but all three volumes are recommended.-- Marie Bednar, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park

Library Journal

Brilliant.

Jackson

One of the features of a classic in that while remaining at one with its times, it reaches out beyond them. War with the Newts fully qualifies as a classic in this sense. -- Los Angeles Times

Michael Henry Heim

Capek's work has lost nothing of its freshness and luster...He is as great a delight to read today as ever.

New York Times Book Review

A bracing parody of totalitarianism and technological overkill, one of the most amusing and provocative books in its genre.”  —Philadelphia Inquirer


"Appreciation of this classic novel." —New York Times​, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/books/in-praise-of-karel-capek.html

From the Publisher