“One of the outstanding works of 1950s Czech literature, Jedlička’s Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life is a book of and out of its time. . . . This excellent translation by Zucker, elegantly published by Karolinum Press, is its first into English. . . . Jedlička brings two senses of the avant-garde into opposition: on the one hand, architectural modularity and symmetry; on the other, the experimental, playful, digressive modes of literary modernism. . . . The form the book itself becomes an act of resistance, and dominates over plot or character. . . . Jedlička at once yearns for and repudiates the pastoral and the lyric, in a critique both literary and ecological. . . . His interrogation of the complicity of political, architectural, and literary structure makes this work important not only as a document of a neglected period of Czech literature, but as a stimulating piece of formal invention.”

Kathryn Murphy, University of Oxford | Times Literary Supplement

“An overlooked classic. . . . [Midway is] a key work in the Czech literary cannon. . . . The characters who populate Jedlička’s Collective House are suspicious of one another, envious, and violent. Human nature fails to live up to the collectivist ideal, and its darker side is more pronounced for trying. . . . Lyrical, poetic . . . at once beautiful and disorienting.”

Emily Thompson | Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

"Midway upon the Journey of Our Life constitutes a dark, bitter and unrelenting assault on the Stalinist project, its human cost, and particularly the intellectual self-deception which sustained it. While thematically anticipating later Czech ‘texts of disillusion,' Jedlička’s original writing style deliberately confronts the Soviet ‘literature of fact’ of the 1920s (here parodied as the ‘poetics of a policeman’) with elements derived from Czech poetism and surrealism. Zucker’s excellent translation captures all of thi. . . . A valuable addition to the catalogue of modernist Czech writing in translation."

Justin Doherty, Trinity College Dublin | BASEES Newsletter

“Bitterly parodies the techniques of ‘literature of fact’ in an attempt to show how the avant-garde’s utopian dreams of a new art for a new society were realized, paradigmatically in the northern Bohemian borderlands, in dystopian art for a dystopian society and landscape.”

Rajendra Chitnis, University of Bristol, from the afterword