More Than One Life is a chronicle of several generations of an upper-middle-class Czech family, told from the point of view of a woman who reached adulthood in the 1930s. Beginning in the years preceding World War II, the story concentrates on the narrator's tragically mismatched parents, and the children's attempts to come to terms with each of them. The father achieved success in life by conventional criteria: he is the husband of an attractive, intelligent woman; he is a successful manufacturer; he has sired four fine children. But he is a man rooted in the conventions of his time, held...