Summary

Based on months of taped conversation with its real-life protagonist, In the Labyrinth is the fictionalized memoir of Hungarian-born, German businessman Josef Pallehner who, due to bureaucratic inertia and his own guilty conscience, gets lost for six years in a maze of eastern Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

n prisons in the wake of the Second World War.

Reception

"Morley's calm yet moving narrative is a fine tribute to a man who endured six years in prison because he lived at a time and place when borders — and his citizenship — changed at the instigation of governments," wrote Elisabeth Anderson in The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

. "In the Labyrinth is marked by great elegance of style”, Carolyn See commented in The Los Angeles Times: “It continues traditions set by Kafka’s In the Penal Colony

In the Penal Colony

"In the Penal Colony" is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919....

 and Cummings

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...

’ The Enormous Room

The Enormous Room

The Enormous Room is a 1922 autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist E. E. Cummings about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I....

.” “The cumulative effect of reading John David Morley’s In The Labyrinth is heartbreak,” declared Gillian Greenwood in The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

: “The dispassionate, observant tone of the book gives great power to its sad and appalling testimony.” "In the Labyrinth is stark and melancholy, the spectrum deliberately limited to wintry monotone," noted Robert Taylor in The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...

 , adding that the narrative "combines elements of Kafka nightmare and the nether world of Dostoevsky's House of the Dead

The House of the Dead (novel)

The House of the Dead is a novel published in 1861 in the journal Vremya by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp...

." "When faction is as finely wrought, as articulate and principled as John David Morley's," judged Marese Murphy in The Irish Times

The Irish Times

The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Kevin O'Sullivan who succeeded Geraldine Kennedy in 2011; the deputy editor is Paul O'Neill. The Irish Times is considered to be Ireland's newspaper of record, and is published every day except Sundays...

, "it becomes a serious work of literature."

External links

• http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/13/books/mind-without-memory.html 'Mind Without Memory', Ann Hulbert, The New York Times Book Review (September 13, 1987)