The Questionnaire

Originally circulated in Czechoslovakia in an underground edition of nineteen typewritten copies (which landed the author in jail for "initiating disorder"), The Questionnaire is Jiri Grusa's internationally acclaimed masterpiece. In completing a standard employment questionnaire, narrator Jan Kepka manages to write a beautifully impressionistic history of his life, his family, and his hometown as he obeys - with mock solemnity - the handwritten command on top of the form: "DO NOT CROSS OUT."