Book excerpt: vejk represents one of the most unique and successful survival strategies ever conceived by man. Joseph Heller said that if it weren't for his having read The Good Soldier vejk he would never had written his American novel Catch-22. The only Czech book on most 100 Best Books of the 20th Century lists. This is a new translation by Zdenek K. Sadlon and Emmett M. Joyce. The Good Soldier vejk is a picaresque series of tales about an ordinary man's successful quest to survive, and to enjoy life in the face of the endless absurdities imposed on him by the effects of the complex institutions of modern society that magnify the rational and moral shortcomings of individuals in direct proportion to their positions in the hierarchies they are a part of. "Like Diogenes, vejk lingers at the margins of an unfriendly society against which he is defending his independent existence." - Peter Steiner "Those people who wanted the novel banned in the newly independent Czechoslovakia (after World War I) and elsewhere, some of whom succeeded, were quite correct to see it as more than a satire on war and militarism (although it is that, as well, of course) the book is a very funny but unrelentingly savage assault on the very idea of bureaucratic officialdom as a human enterprise conferring benefits on those who live under its control and, equally important, on the various justifications such bureaucracies offer for their own existence." - Ian Johnston