To the Castle and Back

I've recently started reading Vaclav Harvel's memoir "To the Castle and Back", whose title naturally reminds me of fellow Czech writer Franz Kafka's book "The Castle". It is a testimony to the difference between the first part of the last century and its final decade that Havel secures a relatively long tenure at "the Castle", whilst the hero of Kafka's novel struggles to gain entry to a rather more surreal fortification. Nevertheless, Havel's own memoir finds him battling with external forces, as well as those internalised within himself, and its wryly ironic structure, or apparent lack of one, reflects this process.

I look forward to properly reviewing "To the Castle and Back" at a later date. In the meantime, readers may observe that the images have mysteriously disappeared from my previous post, and indeed from my other blogs too. Was some censor at work I wondered, given the political content of these blogs ? It seems, however, that this disappearance of photographs and other images is a technical problem of Blogger.com, and that the pictures can reappear, coming back, as it were, from some virtual castle themselves.