Fu(n)k Bomb

Prague, 1989. The dissident movement is gathering strength, four decades of Party rule are visibly crumbling, and President Gustáv Husák has a plan.

Jiří is a true believer – earnest, rather naive, employed at a cultural institution on the outskirts of the city. He is not the obvious person to save Czechoslovak Communism. He is, however, the person Husák summons. The President's diagnosis is clear: the youth are slipping away. His solution is equally clear, if rather harder to execute. What the Party needs is a funk band -- one that will captivate young music lovers with irresistible dance rhythms modeled on "the music of oppressed Black America," while simultaneously delivering carefully vetted Socialist lyrics. Jiří is to make it happen.

What follows is the artistic project of his life and the systematic dismantling of everything he thought he understood about how the world works. The band -- Funky Leninz -- is, against all reasonable expectation, a success. The Party, true to form, promptly begins undermining it from within. And Jiří, a man who set out to preserve the status quo, finds himself, by the strange and pitiless logic of history, pushed into a dissident position.

Fu(n)k Bomb sits squarely in the great tradition of Czech grotesque comedy that runs from Hašek's Good Soldier Švejkthrough the absurdist theatre of Václav Havel – dry, precise, and deeply funny about systems that collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions. Karel Veselý, one of the Czech Republic's most respected music journalists, brings to his fiction an encyclopedic love of funk, soul, and underground rock, and a sharp eye for the particular absurdities of late Communist cultural life.

A witty, affectionate, and surprisingly moving portrait of a moment just before everything changed.

Translated from the Czech and introduced by Charles S. Kraszewski.

© 2026 GP Audiobooks (Lydbog): 9781804842881

Oversættere: Charles S. Kraszewski

Udgivelsesdato

Lydbog: 13. maj 2026