What do authoritative references say about this book:

ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA: "... considered one of the greatest masterpieces of satirical writing." CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS: "... has been hailed as a masterwork, ... has been compared to the satires of British writer Jonathan Swift. ... Jaroslav Hasek has been compared to French satirist Francois Rabelais ... the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus ... to American writer Joseph Heller ..." CRITICAL SURVEY OF LONG FICTION - Foreign Language Series: "His great...masterpiece...book does not have a rival in its genre in this century ..." BERTOLT BRECHT: "If anyone asks me to pick three literary works of this century which in my opinion will become part of world literature, then I would say that one of them is Hasek's 'The Good Soldier Svejk'..." LESLIE A. FIEDLER: "...'terribly funny', we say putting down the book, and not taking the adverb seriously enough."

It seems unconscionable that Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk has been inaccessible to English readers for so long. What if Victor Hugo or Leo Tolstoy had been kept from us? It's hard to imagine literature without them.

published in 56 languages read by tens-, and most probably  hundreds-of-millions people worldwide filmed and dramatized several times

"Like Diogenes, Švejk lingers at the margins of an unfriendly society against which he is defending his independent existence." Peter Steiner, "Tropos Kynikos: Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk "
	A host of literary critics acknowledge that Jaroslav Hašek was one of the earliest writers of what we have come to know as modern literature. He experimented with verbal collage, Dadaism and the surreal. Hašek was writing modern fiction before exalted post-World-War-One writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, to name just a few.

"What Hašek is ridiculing here lies close to the heart of any complex modern institution. It's not difficult to see why it should create such resentment and alarm in a state whose major concern was to foster among its citizens a new sense of their collective Czechoslovak identity and cooperation with the new government. Hašek’s satire on the bureaucracy is, for the most part, energetic and relatively simple. He pictures almost all of its practitioners, from the emperor, to the clergy, to the lowest of petty officials, as stupid incompetents, drunks, full of their own importance, often explicitly racist in their dealings with particular ethnic groups, and hopelessly venal. Their major concern appears to be to protect and personally benefit from their positions, and to do that they will play by the rules of the game whose larger purpose (if it has one at all) they can only articulate with various versions of the official line. To this enterprise they bring no special talents and no wider vision whatsoever." Ian Johnston in On Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk

 

Now that you have heard of, or might have even served in Sarajevo and Bosnia Herzegovina why not buy the Primer on World War Madness Survival:

Books?!