EVEN BAD HORNS CAN MAKE SHARP THORNS (via Foos):

Mr. Skvorecky's most enduring creation was an alter ego, Danny Smiricky, a jazz-loving, northern Bohemian admirer of Mark Twain. Danny, who appears in about half of Mr. Skvorecky's dozen or more novels, struggles -- not always heroically -- to maintain decency amid the terrors and indignities of totalitarian society. In descriptions of forced labor in a Nazi factory, Communist censors, Soviet tanks, political purges, false accusations, stool pigeons and women who allure and tease, Mr. Skvorecky offered glimpses of his life.

Danny made his debut in the author's first novel, "The Cowards," which Mr. Skvorecky finished in 1949, when he was 25. It was not published until nine years later, however, and when it did appear, it was banned, becoming the first great underground classic of postwar Czechoslovakia. [...]

With Mr. Kundera, Mr. Skvorecky shared a fascination with the private lives of people shadowed by the heavyhanded police state, seeking pleasures -- whether those of friendship, music or sex -- in an otherwise joyless political climate. Mr. Skvorecky spoke of his own experience in the introduction to his novella "The Bass Saxophone":

"In the days when everything in life was fresh -- because we were 16, 17 -- I used to blow tenor sax. Very poorly. Our band was called Red Music, which in fact was a misnomer, since the name had no political connotations: there was a band in Prague that called itself Blue Music and we, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had no idea that in jazz blue is not a color, so we called ours Red. But if the name itself had no political connotations, our sweet, wild music did; for jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successfully ruled in my native land."

Follow @brothersjudd