Karel Capek, War with the Newts (1936)

Looking for something new and different to read, I came across Slawomir Mrozek’s marvellous little collection, The elephant. That book is part of Penguin’s Central European Classics series, and the inside jacket marketing of the other books in the series led me to, among other authors, Capek. Thankfully, my local Alice Springs library, one of the most distant places on Earth from Central Europe, had the book (and others from the series) on the shelf.

Written in the mid-1930s, under the looming shadow of Hitler and another inevitable war, War with the Newts is remarkably prescient of today and the imminent future. Not because of impending war, but because of the short-sightedness of economics and politics and me-first profits without any consideration of the consequences for the current or future generations. With lashings of dark humour to make the medicine more palatable, this is a story ripe for this degenerate age of humanity.

What else have I been reading?