To the Castle and Back: Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero by Václav Havel

To the Castle and Back: Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero Reviews

• 
  Jim

  This is a curiously effective and affecting book, perhaps because of its very informality. The "Castle" in the title is Prague Castle, which has been a seat of government for the Czechs for hundreds of years.
  Václav Havel was the last President of Czechoslovakia (the first after the fall of Communism) and the first President of the Czech Republic (after Slovakia opted for its own independence).
  
  
  To the Castle and Back: Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero consists of a series of notes made to his staff between 1993 and 2003 which were discovered on his computer. Then there were sections written in 2005 from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington during a long stay there, and finally a running interview with Karel Hvizd'ala which threads its way through the book. It shows some of the big issues that confronted Havel during his tenure at the Castle, such as the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Czech Republic's entry into NATO. It also shows some of the small issues that endlessly plagued him, such as the following:

  In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it? The lightbulb has been unscrewed so as not to wake it up and upset it.

  At other times, Havel had to complain about the ugliest telephones being in the most prominent places, about the length of the watering hose used in the gardens, and why the good silverware was not being used for state dinners.
  
  I was curious to discover that Havel, despite being an internationally known playwright, was petrified whenever he had to begin writing anything. And he appears to have written all his own speeches!
  
  Particularly impressive was Havel's answer as to what his credo was as the President of the Republic:

  I think that the moral order stands above the legal, political, and economic orders, and that these latter orders should derive from the former, and not be techniques for getting around its imperatives. And I believe this moral order has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and the eternal.

  Would any of our politicians be so cogent and candid?
  
• 
  Robert McDonald

  I just finished Vaclav Havel’s memoir, To the Castle and Back, and the harsh feelings I had towards the book as I began it dissipated a bit by the end. It has an odd structure, equal parts an interview done concerning events before he was president, memos he wrote while he was president, and recollections he wrote some years after he left office, all interspersed randomly among each other, with occasional repetitions of texts. As a biography, it’s a failure. By the end of the book, I still know little of the history of the Czech Republic, or what Havel did while in office. Readers looking for that should go to Havel’s book, Disturbing the Peace. That book remains one of the most influential books I’ve ever read, and I still count myself as lucky for stumbling on it in a friend’s bookshelf.
  
  As a piece of literature, though, To the Castle is a success. Fundamentally, it casts Havel (and all writers and activists) as a sort of postmodern Sisyphus. He writes in depth and at length about his difficulty getting motivated and starting to write. He write, to the point of being whiney, about his intense doubt that his writing and political projects will ever achieve their high objectives. Indeed, he seems to argue that writing is fundamentally futile: “man will carry the complete truth about himself to the grave.” And yet Havel write, driven on by the “somewhat ridiculous” idea that “the world desperately needs the work in question, and will fall apart if it doesn’t appear.” I too like writing and thinking yet have intense self-doubt, and so I get great joy seeing that someone way more gifted than I like Havel suffers the same. I agree with Havel’s quote: “I sometimes ask myself whether I did not originally begin to write… only to overcome my essential experience of inappropriateness… in order to be able to live with those feelings.”
  
  Yet somehow the Sisyphean task of the writer gives him meaning: “He simply tried to capture the world and himself more and more exactly through words, images, or actors, and the more he succeeds, the more aware he is that he can never completely capture either the world or himself… but that drives him to keep trying.” Imagine Sisyphus as conscious of the absurdity of his task, yet still drawing meaning from it. Camus would be proud.
  
  This book is also a lament, for it is perhaps his last, and is certainly written as such. Havel is sending a message: he did his best to write himself into the world, but ultimately failed to communicate his internal self. Like a mortal Sisyphus in old age realizing he will never reach the top of this hill, nor could have.
  
  -Robert[
  http://blog.robertmcdonald.info/]
• 
  Kyle

  I first learned of Havel back in 2003 when I read an article in the New Yorker. I was struck by a particular quote of Havel's in the article, so much so that I actually wrote it down (Once upon a time I kept a small notebook where I would write down quotes that made me think or laugh). Havel wrote that all too often, "living normally begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society".
  
  This quote appealed in the context of Havel challenging the authority of his boss, which I'm sure is what appealed to my rebellious streak. I wrote the quote down and made a mental note to read one of his books someday.
  
  5 years later, I decided to finally purchase one of Havel's books. I settled on his memoir, To the Castle and Back. The Castle refers to the Prague Castle, where Havel spent his years as President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic after the split. To the Castle and Back contains Havel's answers to an interviewer's questions mixed in with memos Havel sent to his staff during his presidencies. The memos provide insight into both the wonderful and the mundane aspects of being the President of a country, and as a playwright Havel does not fail to entertain.
  
  The majority of the book was written while Havel was visiting Washington DC in 2005 and his comments on Americans are hilarious:
  
  "Americans place great store in white teeth, something I find generally agreeable; they have dozens of ways of achieving dental perfection and whiteness, and I don't think it's unusual for people here to have a relatively healthy set of teeth replaced with one that is artificial but more beautiful"
  
  "... American cars, which for unknown reasons, have herds of useless horses under their hoods and are capable of speeds many times greater than is allowed anywhere here"
  
  I also enjoyed the discussion of how absurd Havel found it that he became President, and all his insecurities despite the fact that he is universally regarded as a hero, someone who was instrumental in bringing about the fall of the Soviet Union. The fact that he mixes in memos such as: "We need a longer hose for watering" and "I would ask Mr. Rechtacek to repair and refill my lighter and send it back" with memos dealing with meeting world leaders and setting the course of world events makes it a wonderful reading experience. President Havel, I thoroughly enjoyed your memoir, and promise that it won't be 5 years before we meet again. I just have to decided which one to read next...
• 
  emma

  I read Disturbing the Peace a few months back on my first trip to Prague, and this on my second. The style is definitely odd. I didn't mind the diary entries and the Q&A sectons, but about a third of the way through I had to start skipping the memo sections or I'd have ended up ditching the book completely; they just became a mind-numbing blur of notes regarding speeches and amendments to speeches and the progress of the writing of speeches and the reception of said speeches. Even if I knew the contents of the chuffing speeches (which I don't - I confess my intimate knowledge of Czech day-to-day political dealings in the nineties/noughties is sadly lacking) I would still have wanted to gouge my eyes out. However, the other parts of the book were very readable and thought-provoking. My only criticisms would be ultimately personal and not connected to the quality of the book: I liked Havel without reservation after reading Disturbing the Peace. I agreed with most of his views and the way he saw the world. And so, with To the Castle and Back, I found it hard to reconcile those same views, which were still threaded through the book, with his constant name-dropping of, and almost grovelling respect for, the likes of George Bush and Madeleine Albright (who was nauseatingly referred to simply as Madeleine throughout), and his support for the Iraq invasion. He claims to have been surprised by how like everyone else people in politics are, and yet there's a definite whiff of fawning at times. But these are things I disliked on a personal level, and nothing to do with the writing of the book. An odd thing: he writes in such a way that, when you close the book, you have to remind yourself that he's no longer alive. He has the sort of voice that echoes long after it ceases to exist.
• 
  Dean Cummings

  I was in my early twenties when Vaclav Havel, the playwright and champion of freedom in Eastern Europe was breaking onto the news with images of the "Velvet Revolution" in 1989. I was fascinated as I learned that this man who's never held political office would have only one day to decide if he would accept the prompting of his people to become the president of Czechoslovakia. He did so, and in 1989 became the last president of Czechoslovakia, and in 1993 became the first president of the newly formed Czech Republic. I followed the career and life of this great man and found him to be a very inspirational, humble and sometimes sobering voice for freedom and democracy.
  
  His is one of my favorite quotes: "Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it, or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you."
  
  I began reading "To the Castle and Back" with great anticipation and was not disappointed. I must say that the book was much more personal and less a listing of his achievements, or his resume, which delighted me even more. It also seemed as though Havel moved from subject to subject, story to story without seeming to require too much continuity or thematic flow. This I also enjoyed as it helped me to appreciate each of these stories on their own merit.
  
  A tremendously moving memoir by an incredible man!
• 
  Christina

  There are several reasons why I gave this book 2 stars. It is my first political memoir, so that probably had something to do with it. Also, you need to know a few basic things about Czech politics before picking up this book, because Havel namedrops quite a few people without really going into detail about them.
  
  The structure of the book worked really well in my opinion, and you can easily skip the parts you don't find interesting (in fact, Havel encourages the reader to do so in the introduction). I liked the Q&A parts the most, and I think that's where the substance of the book was. You could clearly see his views on political and social matters, and it's very interesting to see his progress from activist/author to prime minister. I ended up skim-reading the memos to his staff since they were mostly about speech revisions and dinner invitations.
• 
  Geoffrey Rose

  Havel's political memoir. At times, remarkably candid and interesting. Would have been better served by the inclusion of some sort of timeline or chronology for non-Czech readers. Nevertheless, Havel's intellect and spirit will be sorely missed.
• 
  William Korn

  I got this book several years ago, but got bogged down in the scattershot way the material is laid out. However, the content makes a great deal more sense to me now that I've read Tony Judt's Postwar.
• 
  Jay

  Vaclav Havel , on his birthday October 5
  Here is Plato's Philosopher-King, a playwright whose stage is a nation; Vaclav Havel became a figure of the ideal human being and the unconquered spirit of man. His will to become, to defy tyrannical authority and hold fast to Truth, Justice, and Liberty regardless of the cost, to abandon not himself nor his people and together overcome repression and set themselves free; here is a song of revolutionary victory and the triumph of the human spirit to equal Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
  The Garden Party and other Plays collects many of his theatrical works; read also The Beggar's Opera and his final great play Leaving, based on Chekov's The Cherry Orchard and King Lear.
  Read also his illuminating nonfiction ; his revolutionary essay The Power of the Powerless, the collected speeches in The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, the interviews in Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala, and his wonderful absurdist-dadaist memior, To the Castle and Back : Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero.
  He wrote several wonderful forwards to important works; the foundational text, Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street by Tomáš Sedláček. Another forward, for the marvelous biography A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor , by Caroline Stoessinger. Again a Forward, to the revolutionary manual Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World, by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson. And again, for No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, by Xiaobo Liu. There are more; committed to freedom for all humanity, his work has rippled out globally as an informing and motivating source.
  Living in Truth: 22 Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize is a marvelous summation of his life work. And read Vaclav Havel: The Authorized Biography by Eda Kriseová.
  
  
• 
  Mila

  I love this guy. He comes across so down to earth and honest; I'm surprised he survived in politics as long as he did. I was surprised to see that he wrote all his own speeches and how much he agonized over them - probably because he wrote them himself. From the very start in his preface I knew I would enjoy it. Here is the Preface in its entirety:
  
  

  I am delighted that this strange little book of mine is now available to English-speaking readers. I was unable, nor did I wish, to write a full-blown memoir, but after everything I have lived through, I felt I owed people an account of some kind. So I decided to fashion a special kind of collage. It has its own architecture, one that unfolds and interweaves themes and motifs and time periods. It builds slowly, gathering momentum as it goes. I wrote it quickly, without a specific reader in mind. As a result there are some passages that may not interest all of my fellow citizens, and others that non-Czech readers may find hard to follow. Still others refer to events that have long since been carried away by time. And yet, rather than make cuts, I let these passages stand because they belong to the flavor and the fabric of the times, and because I wanted to remind readers that I was not just taking part in routine changes of government; we were building a new democratic country, as it were, from the ground up.
  If you occasionally feel like putting the book aside because it seems to skirt some of the world-shaking events that I lived through, or to burrow too deeply into exclusively Czech of Czechoslovak matters, I urge you to skip ahead. It's easy to do because the book is divided not only into chapters, but into short sequences, separated by horizontal lines. But whether you read it whole or piecemeal, I will be satisfied if you feel this book has given you something of value.
• 
  Chris Hall

  This was good (and unconventional) - I particularly liked the contrast it gave between Havel's official communications and his personal reflections.
  
  It's probably worth mentioning that this book is only concerned with his time in power - if you’re looking for insights into how this came about and Charter 77 etc, then you won't find any of that here ...
  
  Two things stood out for me: Firstly the inordinate amount of time he spent fussing over preparing state dinners and maintenance of the castle grounds; secondly the almost constant presence of Madeline Albright who seems to keep cropping up (I'm not really sure why).
  
  At times he falls into banal political platitudes but despite this it's worth reading.
• 
  Janet Hartman

  Would give this 3.5 stars if I could. Of Czech ancestry on my mother's side, I was interested in the history of this man who was president of both Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.
  
  I enjoyed the parts in italics in the the edition I read. These were the sections where he wrote down his own thoughts, as if in a diary. His observations on the differences between Americans and Czechs were particularly interesting and often amusing. The other sections were hit or miss. Some were dry instructions or notes about things and I found my self skimming these more and more until the last 50 pages or so
• 
  Dolf van der Haven

  This book is a great follow-up to Disturbing the Peace. There are three different parts interlaced:
  1. Memoirs from 2005, while Havel was in the US after his period as a president. These are y far the most interesting pieces, mostly commenting on international issues.
  2. Answers to questions from Hvizdala, in the same style as in Disturbing the Peace. These are sometimes more interesting than other times, depending on how deep into Czech history you are. For me as a foreigner who has been to the Czech Republic numerous times, I can get into most of it, but other aspects remain quite obscure because I do not know many of the subjects.
  3. Notes from Havel as a President to his staff. This is often a list of complaints about him having to write speeches and other organisational things going wrong. By far the least interesting parts, and I started skipping them when another identical complaint came by.
  Overall, this is a good book, could be a star more if I were Czech and had lived through the period Havel describes, but for me as a foreigner often too obscure or irrelevant.
• 
  Lysergius

  A fascinating collection of memories, memos, notes, and interviews by the ex-President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Most interesting are Havel's thoughts on Klaus, and Zeman. Though his account of his trip to the US in 2005 is also interesting.
  
  A must for Havel fans.
• 
  Kian Tajbakhsh

  Some Excerpts From
  To the Castle and Back
  Vaclav Havel
  This material may be protected by copyright.
  
  “As for being critical of the West, I have no need to criticize the West to show some kind of “balance,” in other words to demonstrate my independence: I’m secure in my independence and therefore feel no need to demonstrate it. I have been trying to subject the West, and in fact modern civilization in general, to critical reflections for a very long time now”
  
  
  “we started directly, after a few days of revolution, to build a normal democratic society.”
  
  
  “democracy is not just systems, institutions, and their interrelations; in other words, it’s not just a technique but above all it is a relationship to the world and to society, a way of thinking, the spirit of public life”
  
  
  “Shortly after the revolution and the arrival of freedom, a very special kind of anticommunist obsession established itself in public life. It was as though some people—people who had been silent for years, who had voted obediently in communist elections, who had thought only of themselves and had been careful not to get into trouble—now felt the sudden need to compensate in some aggressive way for their earlier humiliation, or for the feeling or suspicion that they might have been found wanting. And so they took aim at the people who least held it against them, that is, the dissidents. They still felt, unconsciously, that the dissidents were the voice of their bad conscience, living proof that you didn’t have to completely knuckle under if you didn’t want to.”
  
  “When civil society languishes, when the life of organizations and voluntary associations is curtailed, then sooner or later political parties will begin to languish as well, until, ultimately, they become degenerate ghettos whose only purpose is to elevate their members into positions of power.”
  
• 
  Kellan

  I'm really more acquainted with
  Vaclav Havel the playwright-turned-celebrity-activist then Havel the writer, and so I can only speak with limited authority (none at all really) as to how this compares to his larger body of work.
  
  I don't think I'm being inappropriately harsh when I say that it utterly fails as a book. As a thing with a front and a back cover, and a linear progression of numbered pages which you move through by turning them over. The failure infact is to imagine this work as a book at all.
  
  Fundamentally this is a hypertextual account of Havel's daily experience, largely mundane, as the Czech president. If instead of a book, this had been a website, or maybe a hypercard stack, that allowed us to scrub forward and back through time, and drill down on names and events, pivot on place and conflict, then perhaps this series of extracted diary entry and notes to staff would have built a meaningful picture.
  
  Or perhaps I simply lack the patience right now, perhaps this is a book to revisit one snowy winter, without pressures or deadlines, or engagements, nothing but plodding days, in which to tease out a narrative structure that at first (and second and third) glance appears to be wholly absent.
  
  Or perhaps the clue was there in the title all along, a Czech reader would have immediately and intuitively understood the connection with Kafka's "The Castle" and that the story was the journey to the heart of that shadowy and plodding bureaucracy and alienation.
  
  I don't know. Maybe I'll pick it up again. But I'm not going to go on paying the library late fees.
• 
  Bernie

  It was OK. It was a little difficult to read as it went back and forth between what Vaclav Havel was doing currently, what he was doing at a certain point in his presidency, and responses to a Czech reporter. The current stuff was interesting when he was writing from the USA and what he thought about its people and culture. The responses to the reporter were interesting when the subject was. I accidently got this book because the Library didn't have the book I wanted to read regarding Havel--- Disturbing the Peace. Havel is certainly a brave man and in many ways to be admired. Of course, as a writer and playwright, he was playful even in this book. "In his closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it? The lightbulb has been unscrewed so as not to wake it up and upset it..." Is this a profound analogy? I can't be sure thought my imagination conjures a few. Another one though keeps repeating and I am certain it is a lament that his life has grown toward its end, when there is still much to do. It says "We need a longer hose for watering...."
• 
  Penelope

  I just couldn't finish it. Might pick it up again if I have time, but this is a very slow read--it's not engrossing or engaging really, but it is still interesting. Vaclav Havel has led an amazing life, but this book is strangely dull. I feel like it's intentionally so...it seems like Havel doesn't want to give anyone the illusion that he has lived a charmed life (the title is certainly tongue in cheek).
  
  The book is fragmented and disjointed; it's separated into chapters (which seemed arbitrary), and within the chapters there are sections mixed among one another including q&a with a journalist, memos from his presidency, notes from his trip to Washington, etc. Some of the snippets are very interesting, and I found myself marking a few passages. As a whole, however, this book is pretty difficult to get into.
• 
  Lance Crossley

  I can guarantee, you will never find an autobiography of a politician like this. In an era where Hilary and everyone else comes out with self-promoting manifestos, Havel shows who he really is and always has been -- not a politician, but an artist. He shows the peculiar and sometimes absurd minutia of being a head of state (at one point he questions why there are three antiquated telephones in the reception lobby to his office -- "why three?) and he shows flashes of his self-loathing and self-doubt.
  
  As a final note, as a speechwriter myself, I was impressed to find he wrote all his speeches. You won't find a politician who does that anymore.
  
  I would rate this higher BUT I realize this is more for a niche audience, particularly anyone with an association with Czech Republic or with a respect for the man who lead the Velvet Revolution.
• 
  Carole

  This book reads more like the the audio commentary on a DVD called "The Czech Republic from 1989 to 2005" than it does a like a memoir. And just like you wouldn't watch the audio commentary before seeing the movie, you probably wouldn't enjoy this book as much if you don't already know a little bit about some of the recent history of Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic. Not that I'm an expert. I would have enjoyed the book more if I was more of an expert. As it is, I enjoyed it pretty well.
  
  A better introduction to Vaclav Havel would be Summer Meditations or his collected speeches. He's one of the politicians that I admire most.
• 
  Emma

  It seemed like a book by a playwright. Each little section was a vignette. In the beginning he tells the reader they may skip parts if they find it boring or whatnot, and I definitely did that a few times. He interweaves his old diary (or memos) from his time at the Castle, answering an interviewer's questions, and a present day (2005) writings of his current musings. While I did skip some parts I found other parts quite fascinating. This is the first I've read of Vaclav Havel, and while maybe not the best place to start to get a grasp of his ideas, it's certainly interesting to learn more about the man. He was very thoughtful and articulate. Interesting, but probably not for most people.
• 
  Ryan Moore

  I'd really prefer to read one of Havel's plays or a book that he wrote that isn't in a Q&A format. This book intermingled Q&A, random notes, and went back and forth like a bad flashback. Even with Havel's disclaimer that this was how the book was going to be it's a bit annoying. Good book but probably not the best primer on the subject.
• 
  D

  A memoir about the Czech, during the 2 months he ran away to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Interspersed with notes from his time as President, and mingled with musings about life in America: politicians appear to be be political all day, as opposed to his country, where they like to relax after work; drivers are courteous to pedestrians; everyone has a good haircut and smell nice.
• 
  Tim

  you better be very interested in this guy to enjoy this book. It's a self-admitted grabbag of odds and ends, some of which, he admits, may be pretty boring unless you're very interested in the inner workings of the czech govt 20 years ago.
• 
  David Kirkpatrick

  Read / skimmed this given recent trip to Prague. Gives a feel for post Velvet Revolution Czech and European politics and Havel's view of the US. Disjointed style however... His prior books may be more digestible.
• 
  Melissa Johnson

  I think the U.S. could use an enlightened leader like Vaclav Havel.