The expression "the engineer of human souls" is held, by many political indoctrinators, to be Stalin's definition of a writer: as an engineer constructs a machine, so must a writer construct the mind of the New Man. THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As adventuresome, episodic, bawdy, comic, and literary as any novel written in the past twenty-five years, THE ENGINEER is worthy of the subtitle Skvorecky gave it: "An entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, The Working Class, Secret Agents, Love, and Death.