In a Pig's Ear

In the Czech state film studios in Nazi-occupied Prague, a young actress, dressed as a nun, is impregnated by the Devil, and in a concrete tower in due course a child is born.The child grows up to be Milan, a fashionable Czech therapist who moves from wartime Europe through Southern California to born-again Berlin, where his close friend, filmmaker Adam Epstein, resolves to build his own twenty-first-century version of Camelot. But Adam's past is inextricably woven into the troubled history of Middle Europe and thickly populated with ghosts, witches, and demons, while Milan himself is haunted by the dark shadow of Joseph Goebbels and his own obscure beginnings in Nazi-occupied Prague. Imprisoned for a murder of which he has no recollection, Milan turns to a pig, his sole companion, to share his tale.In a Pig's Ear is a vivid, at times gruesome novel about the passions and hatreds unleashed by the collapse of Communism, and the aesthetic forms summoned to contain and explain them.