"Enjoyable philosophical novels can be counted on a hand or two. ...
Now, American readers can add to this skimpy list this obscure but thoroughly deserving trilogy."
—Daniel Drabelle, Washington Post Book World
"One of the most successful attempts at a philosophical novel in any language."
—René Wellek
"Čapek's masterpiece."
—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
This trilogy of novels was the culmination of Karel Čapek's career. The novels share neither characters nor events; instead, they approach the problem of knowing people - of mutual understanding - in a variety of ways. Detectives faced with a murder reconstruct the crime, but not the character of the man who was murdered. Three people tell stories about a dying pilot they know almost nothing about; each story is as full of truth as it is devoid of facts. And one man looks back on his life and discovers all the people he might have been. Together, these three short novels form a readable philosophical novel unique in world literature.
$15.95 paper, 480 pp., ISBN 0-945774-08-7.
"I'm only giving you an outline of the story of Case X, indeed, it isn't even an outline; I couldn't give a connected account of what happened to him from one year to the next. Besides, his life didn't consist of events; events necessitate will, or something, at least, that isn't indifference; but having lost his memory, Case X undoubtedly lost most of the motives that influence people. You can't conceive what an alert force our memory is; we look at the world through eyes of previous experience, we greet things like old acquaintances, and our attention is held by what captivated it once; the greater part of our relations with everything around us is tied by the fine and invisible hands of reminiscence. A man without memory would be a man without relations; he would be surrounded by strangeness, and the sound which would reach him would not contain any answers.
And yet think of Mr. Kettelring wandering from place to place as if he were seeking something. Don't be deceived by that; he was not interested enough to be after anything, and if he had been left to himself perhaps he would have stayed sitting permanently by that cracking wall at Deux Maries, gazing at the lizards, darting or motionless. He merely accepted the commercial interests of the Cuban Don as his own and he was led on by them. Everywhere there was some step, or stump, where he could sit down; he followed the path of a drop of sweat running down his back; he listened to the dry rustling of the palms, or of the lebbek pods, and he was mildly amused to see how lazily people moved. It was like a kaleidoscope, and he turned it round to make them move quicker.
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