[2] It tells the story of a Jew in Prague in 1942, during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, who is waiting to be deported to the concentration camps but trying to maintain as normal an existence as possible.
[2] When the occupying Nazis force him to leave the rope shop he owns, Mundstock's psyche starts to crack.
In a review for The New York Times, Richard M. Elman described the book as "brilliant" and said of it that "Ladislav Fuks's novel is not just another pious Holocaust book; it is acute, unsentimental, and unsparing, a work of intricate but compassionate narrative art, as if Kafka's K had literally confronted the crematoria."
[2] Webster Schott in Life magazine called it "one of literature's near miracles" and "excruciatingly poignant, clear and hard as diamonds in its English translation by Iris Urwin", saying that it "catapults Ladislav Fuks, Mundstock's 44-year-old Czech creator, into the first rank of contemporary literary moralists.
[5] In 2016, a Czech language stage adaptation written by Miloš Horanský and starring Vojtěch Dyk as Mundstock was performed at the Veletržní Palác, part of the National Gallery in Prague.