Fight with knives

To prepare for my upcoming semester in Prague in 2003, I started reading all sorts of Czech writers. Amazon had recommended The Engineer of Human Souls, which is a badass title for a book, except for the fact that it is something Stalin said. Details are a bitch.

I don’t remember anything about that book except that I liked it, that it was thick, and that the knowledgeable, attractive 40-ish professor has sex with one or more of his undergraduate female students. The Engineer of Human Souls is notable because it was the last storyline in which I thought this cliche was tolerable. By the time I got through two books of Kundera’s and a dorm lounge viewing of Wonder Boys, I was groaning and rolling my eyes because you know what never once crossed my mind in college? Approaching one of my professors and asking him to have sex with me. I’m pretty sure it never happened with my college friends, or acquaintances, either. I’ve only known about it happening in the course of my six years of academic life, and that was creepy, too.

(You may contact me with anonymous confessions if that is something you did! Maybe I was wrong about this whole thing and I totally should have gotten in on the prof shag like in the storybooks when I had the chance.)

Anyway, Josef Skvorecky, either by luck or by timing or through sheer charm, you were the last man who made the dirty middle-aged lothario professor cliche believable. Rest in peace.