Usually when we think about communism in fiction or film, the dramatic stuff comes to mind—the Cold War, spies, the gulag, interrogations, and the like. But if that was all there was to communist societies, they would have lasted even a shorter time than they actually did. All societies are premised on ordinary people getting on with the business of life, going to school and going to work and having children and eating and sleeping, in as ordinary way as possible.

Martin Šimečka, a noted critic of the ČSSR who first published this book in samizdat editions, presents in his The Year of the Frog a non-sensationalistic look at ordinary life for ordinary citizens who know full well that they live in a communist, nearly totalitarian regime. It’s about the very small-scope freedoms granted and grabbed and what people to do with them. It also shows how little these freedoms count when you’re hemmed in on every side...