Recommendations
Books Like The Good Soldier Švejk
Best books to read after The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
If Švejk's magnificent anti-war absurdism made you laugh, these picks span the tradition of the comic anti-war novel, Czech and Central European satirical fiction, and the literature of cheerful subversion.
- 1Buy
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
The American heir of Švejk — Yossarian and the military SNAFU taken to its ultimate absurdist conclusion.
- 2Buy
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
The tragic counterpart — Josef K. facing a bureaucratic tyranny that is no less absurd for being lethal.
- 3Buy
Too Loud a Solitude
by Bohumil Hrabal
The other great Czech comic novel — Haňt'a rescuing books from the baler with the same deadpan persistence as Švejk.
- 4Buy
The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Oskar refusing to grow — German absurdism facing the same Central European catastrophe from a more grotesque angle.
- 5Buy
Mother Courage and Her Children
by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht's great anti-war play, influenced by Hašek — Mother Courage profiting from the war that destroys her family.
- 6Buy
Closely Watched Trains
by Bohumil Hrabal
Hrabal's novella of a young train dispatcher during the occupation — comic and suddenly devastating, pure Czech.
- 7Buy
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
The Czech political novel in its most philosophical mode — the same society, a more tragic lens.
- 8Buy
Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
The great Russian predecessor of the satirical compliance novel — Chichikov navigating provincial absurdity with a different kind of cheerfulness.
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