"Heller, who died in 1999, told various interviewers that Céline and Kafka were his most powerful influences and that "Svejk" was "just a funny book.""
"The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. "
I was really surprised by Closing Time. I forget all the details of it, but I remember finding it just relentlessly depressing. The only degree to which I thought it worked was, it really emphasized the extent to which we really don’t need to know what happens to characters after the story is done, it is better if we just imagine they go on to have their lives.
