Vignettes from Cold War Prague

Julian Evans enjoys a Czech cult classic by the kingpin of the underground literary resistance to totalitarianism

at home and piling on the pounds.

During the two world wars, excess and indulgence were turned into shameful vices that conflicted with national duty. Scales became bathroom staples shortly after 1918, the year that Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories by Lulu Hunt Peters became a bestseller in America. Corsets were phased out, photography swept across fashion magazines, and, with ready-towear clothing replacing the bespoke, sizing was now fixed and competitive.

Meltzer’s whistle-stop history of America’s body image is both effortlessly informative and efficiently selective – as a seasoned magazine writer for Vogue and Vanity Fair she knows how to juice a handful of facts with a brisk squeeze of the fist. Nuggets from Nidetch’s autobiography and the Weight Watchers archives are served alongside chunks of feminist theory and juicy asides – who knew Ivana Trump once said “it makes me feel powerful to be hungry” or that Cinderella was Disney’s first “thin” animated heroine?

Every now and again, Meltzer stops zipping through the history books and comes up for air, taking a moment to fill us in on her own experience of Weight Watchers: going to meetings, trying the recipes, even attempting a cruise. She finds it hard to let go of her preconception that Weight Watchers is “one of the most basic, retro, lowest common denominator, least chic diet companies in the world”. More difficult still, she “doesn’t have a good answer for why I am still fat” and is clearly exhausted trying to figure it out. Worse than the actual diet is thinking about dieting, which is relentless.

Throughout the book, Meltzer holds the reader at arm’s length. This is nothing like Roxane Gay’s evisceratingly personal 2017 memoir Hunger, which revealed the writer’s obesity was a symptom of rape. Gay gained weight for protection from the eyes of men – each sentence is shocking to read and must have been excruciating to write. Meltzer, who profiled Gay for Elle in 2017 and refers to her often, prefers not to go into too much personal detail, presenting a curated selection of traumas and micro-aggressions with a shield of detachment. While this allows for a great deal of organic empathy towards Meltzer – she is never one to milk an anecdote for pity’s sake – the emotional roots of the book seem to dangle above ground.

She hints that a seven-year relationship with a man significantly lighter than her was difficult, but goes no further. Her parents, who put her on her first diet aged five, are reproached but never exposed. Her bulimia and clinical depression are merely mentioned. Naturally a reader has no right to demand such personal truths from a writer, but by framing the book as part memoir, Meltzer invites a certain level of nosiness. “Eating, for me, is really about transgression, a rebellion against myself,” writes Meltzer. But what rebellion? I finished the book still nibbling hungrily at all the things left unsaid.

LA CZECH DREAMBOOK by Ludvík Vaculík, tr Gerald Turner 450pp, Karolinum, £21, ebook £22.80

udvík Vaculík, I had better admit it, is a hero of mine. The late Czech author of “Two Thousand Words to Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists, and Everyone”, the manifesto that first led Brezhnev’s party leadership in Moscow to denounce the 1968 Prague Spring as a counter-revolution, was an outspoken, rebellious but modest progressive who defined his political struggle in the simplest terms. “The whole of my life,” he told me, when I met him for a cup of coffee in Prague four decades after those events, “I was trying to attain freedom.” After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he could have had any ministerial job he wanted, but he refused. To take on a governmental role, he said, would have meant losing his freedom,

“to lose it in another way”.

Vaculík’s position as an outlier rarely stopped him playing whatever role he chose.

“Everyone knows my genre,” he writes in A Czech Dreambook. In Czechoslovakia, everyone did: though a member of the Communist Party, he was on the side of the people, not the institution. “The Two Thousand Words” had been wildly popular, calling for action by the public in case of military intervention, denying the party’s leading role. Later, as a signatory of Charter 77, he then published “Remarks on Courage”, warning the charterists not to mythologise and distance themselves from the people. After he was banned from publishing in the wake of 1968, Vaculík became an important samizdat figure, known for his brief, sharply ironic, clandestinely published essays, and for running an underground press that published other banned writers.

A Czech Dreambook could not be more different. When he suddenly hit the buffers in his samizdat role, suffering profound writer’s block, his friend the poet Jiří Kolář suggested he write about why he was unable to write. The result is a

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45 million Americans are today on a diet, spending $33 billion a year on weight loss