My Golden Trades Book

I took a Czech literature class when studying abroad in Prague while I was a college student, and was completely blown away by the great novels and plays that had been produced in the Czech Republic by authors I had never heard of.

While I had read Milan Kundera before (and who's going to disregard Franz Kafka?), Ivan Klima was a writer I had never come across in the states. And that was a total shame. Klima writes with a simple, but poetic style about everyday life, momentous events, everything. For example, My Golden Trades is about a young man who does not have a set goal in life; instead, he wanders from job to job, some mind-numbing, some mundane, most low-paying, learning from co-workers and ordinary people, and trying desperately to figure his life out.

As a college senior who had no idea what she was going to do upon graduation, this cut right to the core: who hasn't been totally aimless, unsure of what their next step will be? And who hasn't feared the cookie-cutter mold a modern economy forces us into? It's a sad fact that for as much freedom as our society supposedly affords us, with a troubled job market, disappearing trades, and ever-increasing pressure put on young people to find a career and stick with it as soon as they can, it's almost impossible for people to question what they want/ change what they want to be. Reading this book comforted me because it showed that there were other people who weren't content to just find a job, stay put and kill their soul in the process.

I gave this book to a friend who has never stayed with a job longer than a year. Who knows if she read it. But for anyone else who's questioned their life's path, I highly recommend it.

(On a sidenote, tons of other Czech authors are amazing to read. Bohumil Hrabal, Karl Capek (wrote a play about robots before anyone even knew what they were), and Jaroslav Hasek to name just a few. T.G. Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, wrote an amazing biography that makes it even more obvious that our current president is a complete horse's ass).