The Ultimate Intimacy | Granta

  • Published: 10/09/1998
  • ISBN: 9781862071155
  • 128x20mm
  • 400 pages

The Ultimate Intimacy

Ivan Klima

Translated by A.G. Brain

On the day his mother dies, a beautiful stranger come to hear Protestant pastor Daniel Vedra preach. Having lived in Prague during the Communist regime- under constant suspicion and interrogation- Daniel’s life now seems easier and fuller than ever before. But as the relationship that develops between the highly respected clergyman and another man’s wife reintroduces Daniel to intimacy, so it come to threaten everything he has lived for: his family, his vocation and his future.

The Ultimate Intimacy is a quiet, intense study of a man who moves from a state of emotional neutrality to one of controlled complexity... Klima skilfully catches the confusion, ambiguity and the strangling the lives of his characters... [his] achievement remains his humane understanding of moral and emotional confusion and his ability to question these dilemmas.

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

This is a novel of extraordinary complexity, a portrait not just of a human soul, a marriage, and a great love, but also of a city and a society in a convulsion of new-found liberty and freedom... both absorbing and remarkably upsetting.

Sunday Telegraph

This is art in its true sense

Sunday Times

The Author

Ivan Klima was born in 1931 in Prague, where he now lives, and was editor of the journal of the Czech Writers’ Union during the Prague Spring. He is the author of many plays, stories and novels, including Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, The Ultimate Intimacy and My Golden Trades, and a non-fiction book, The Spirit of Prague, all of which are published by Granta Books. His work, which is now published worldwide, was once banned in his own country.

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