| rdfs:comment | - War with the Newts is an 1936 novel by Karel Čapek. Czech Captain Van Toch is ordered to go pearl fishing and ends up on Tana Masa, an island near Sumatra. The natives won't let him into Devil Bay, contending that there are demons there, but Van Toch goes there anyway with a few gutsy native boys, who return with several pearls and a strange tale of darkly colored lizard demons. Toch, after quite a bit of drinking, teaches these lizards to fetch him pearls but sees that their small population is threatened by sharks. As he has become to see these lizards as almost his children, he becomes enraged, and goes to his old childhood rival from his village, Bondy, who is now an industry magnate. Which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, considering the small size of Czechoslovakia.
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| abstract | - War with the Newts is an 1936 novel by Karel Čapek. Czech Captain Van Toch is ordered to go pearl fishing and ends up on Tana Masa, an island near Sumatra. The natives won't let him into Devil Bay, contending that there are demons there, but Van Toch goes there anyway with a few gutsy native boys, who return with several pearls and a strange tale of darkly colored lizard demons. Toch, after quite a bit of drinking, teaches these lizards to fetch him pearls but sees that their small population is threatened by sharks. As he has become to see these lizards as almost his children, he becomes enraged, and goes to his old childhood rival from his village, Bondy, who is now an industry magnate. Which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, considering the small size of Czechoslovakia. The doorman Povondra is not sure whether to let him in, which eventually becomes a plot point. Bondy does not believe the insane, rambling, racist-epithet-full tale, but has a feeling that he should grant the request of a ship to carry the lizards around and establish lizard colonies. Which happens to have some very far-reaching effects on the planet Earth. Karel Čapek segues from this point into short stories and newspaper clippings to tell of the eventual eponymous war with the Newts, as they come to be called, while sharply satirizing everything from Nazism to Hollywood. Oh, and he seemingly foretells the Munich Agreement, except Czechoslovakia is China, and Germany is the Newts.
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