The Colors of Despair.(No Saints or Angels by Ivan Klima)

Meet Kristyna. Right from the start of Ivan Klima's latest novel, "No Saints or Angels," the middle-aged, divorced dentist in Prague is flirting with despair. She is--in her own words, since Klima writes in the first person--"shivering with loneliness," losing whatever sense of self-worth she once had. "For a moment I look at myself in the hostile mirror," she thinks. "No, the mirror's not hostile, it's dispassionately objective; it's time that's hostile." Jana, her teenage daughter, is sinking into a world of drugs and joyless sex, and the mother feels powerless to save her. Little wonder that Kristyna describes herself as "tired, worn-out and empty; a vase without flowers."

This is the emotionally bleak terrain familiar to readers of Klima, the Czech novelist who first earned acclaim in the late communist era. But Klima's growing literary stature is a product of far more than his ability to paint despondency. In his new novel, he once again introduces characters who illustrate the continuum between life under the repressive old regime and the difficulties and disappointments of the new era of freedom. Governments change, the rules change, but many of the intensely personal struggles get no easier. In Kristyna's case, Klima skillfully lures the reader on with hints that her fate isn't sealed, the outcome of her story far from certain. While bleakness is the leitmotif, Kristyna is skittishly flirting with hope along with despair.

The origins of her self-doubts aren't hard to trace. Born in 1953 on the same day that Stalin died, Kristyna can't shake the past--or the legacy of the men of her family. Her grandfather divorced her Jewish grandmother when the Germans invaded, leaving her to perish in the Holocaust; this allowed him to save his furniture shop, which he promptly lost once the communists came to power. Her mother never forgave him and rebelled by marrying a communist, who refused to celebrate his daughter's birth on the same day that "the greatest genius of mankind" died because it would be "a political mistake." Kristyna reads all this in her father's diaries, which her mother hands over to her after his recent death. At the same time, she finds herself ministering to her cancer-stricken ex-husband, who even on his deathbed insists on blaming her for their daughter's misfortunes. What her father and ex-husband have in common is that they both ...