Through this lens we see the rise of the newts. It flits all over the world from person to person, like World War Z, and incorporates records, news clippings, reports and so on. The book doesn’t really stick with main characters. You could almost see the comic panels in which his head turns from red to purple to blue as he negotiates with an Indonesian tribesman. I mentioned the swearing captain, who is introduced to us as if he walked straight out of an Asterix comic. The imitation game continues, and soon the newts learn how to talk, read newspapers and perform labour.ĭespite this book being from another age, Capek affects a playful style with some typical techniques like exaggeration and comedic repetition that still feels fresh and timeless today. Van Toch takes a liking to them and brings the newts along with him all across the Dutch Indies, looking for pearls. The salamanders, child-sized and with little baby-hands, waddle about like penguins and imitate Van Toch as he opens shells with his knife. So, what about those newts, then? The book starts with the corpulent, swearing, red-in-the-face Dutch captain Van Toch, who finds a species of intelligent salamanders on an island in Indonesia. Nevertheless, it inspired a number of adaptations, mainly stage plays, and influenced future writers who were lucky enough to find a copy.

For years it was out of print and hard to get hold of. The book is not well known in Western Europe and the English-speaking world. The Nazis blacklisted it, naturally, and later on Czechia disappeared behind the Iron Curtain.

War with the Newts, full of commentary on fascism, colonialism, capitalism and nationalism – all the isms –, slipped away from the public eye after those events, and it may have something to do with its contents. A few years after this book was published, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia and Capek was branded a public enemy, but he had already passed away by then from pneumonia.

Published in 1936, War with the Newts is one of the last novels by Czech author Karel Capek, and is a thinly-veiled satire on, well, on a whole lot of things, but mainly on fascism. Newts, you say? What could that possibly mean?

War with the Newts by Karel Čapek