Too Loud a Solitude: One of RPI's Czech Books You Must Read

Radio Prague International named Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude one of its Czech Books You Must Read. It's an insightful and informative post that I highly recommend. Here's a comment about the book from Esther Peters, Associate Director of the Center for East European and Russian Studies at the University of Chicago:

“The world would be a better place if more people read this book. It is an incredibly engaging read. It is so much fun and yet it is incredibly intellectual. It makes you think. Every time I read it there are new things to think about and it is one of the few books that I think combines these aspects so perfectly that you can delve into it, love reading it and just enjoy the process of reading.

“It is about knowledge, language, process and ritual, but it is also just a good story. That combination of things is quite rare I think. It challenges you to think, but keeps you entertained at the same time.

“Every time I read it something new pops out. I think that is another thing. It changes with the reader. I think that it probably changed with Hrabal as he wrote it. It is something you can take with you. It is a companion.”

Peters delves into why Hrabal is so difficult to translate, and the article talks about the three versions of this book, how it was semi-autobiographical, and more. Check it out, along with the other "must read" books they have highlighted.


My post on Too Loud a Solitude can be found here.

Slavnosti snezenek / The Snowdrop Festival (1984 film, Czechoslovakia)

In my post on Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab by Bohumil Hrabal I mentioned that Jiří Menzel had directed a movie based on those stories set in the Kresko settlement of Bohemia. I finally watched a copy of the movie with English subtitles and I found it almost as much of a joy as the stories on which they were based. This is the third Menzel movie I've watched based on Hrabal's stories and I'm convinced they were a match made in celluloid heaven. Menzel captures the playfulness, ambiguity, and the subversiveness of Hrabal's writing.

Menzel includes many of the quirky people and situations populating Rambling on, capturing their traits and peculiarities making them memorable. For example, watching the farmer take his goats for a ride in his car provides the same smile, inside and out, as the reading provided. Menzel downplays the subversion in Hrabal's stories, probably a factor of filming in Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. Hrabal's chief of police dispenses arbitrary justice favoring his friends (and himself) while meddling in everyday affairs. While Menzel's characters distrust the police chief, he provides a calming effect on the populace, especially at a rowdy dinner party.

Even though the movie provides many laughs and smiles, a sadness permeates the bucolic setting. Like the stories, alcohol provides a social lubricant as well as an escape. Just what people are trying to escape isn't quite clear, amplifying Hrabal's ambiguous messages, although you wouldn't be far off the mark if you simply answered "their lives." While some things give these characters joy, many things drive their desire to escape, including family, work, government, opportunity, and materialism.

Similar to Hrabal's style, Menzel allows the quirkiness and banality of the residents to supply both beauty and humor. It's a dark humor, though, but one that celebrates the uniqueness of each character, breaking your heart while making you laugh. The central story for the movie is "The Feast," where competing hunting clubs argue over the right to feast on a wild boar shot in a local schoolroom. When you watch Menzel's version you'll agree with Hrabal's repeated admonition in the story that "you've never seen, nor could you have seen, the things I saw, we saw, the things that came to pass that time when a boar, a wild boar, got shot by us folk from Velenka inside the school at Přerov." Menzel combines "The Feast" with another story that marks a bittersweet turn to the drunken fight/feast.

I don't know where the movie was filmed but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the opening montage of local scenery was shot in and around Kresko (don't quote me on that, though), where Hrabal had a cottage he used when he wanted a break from Prague. Hrabal has a cameo in the movie, sitting on the porch of a pub with another patron, a pint of beer in front of him. I raised a glass to him while I was watching it and to the movie in general. Despite not displaying the full complexity of Hrabal's stories, Menzel does a wonderful job of adapting them to the screen. Very highly recommended.

The inventor of the cock-and-bull story?

I had more quotes from the recently released Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of Gab by Bohumil Hrabal that I didn't mention, but I didn't want the post to run too long. I stumbled across a copy of Hrabal's 1966 story collection The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (sometimes titled The World Cafeteria) and I realized the last entry in Rambling on was an introduction to the earlier collection. A passage in the earlier translation struck me as much as it did in the recent release, so I'll provide a short post with the "paragraph" that struck me. Well, paragraph is misleading for a six-page sentence, but you catch my drift. The earlier version was translated as "Handbook for the Apprentice Palaverer" by Michael Henry Heim, but I'll go with the recent version titled "An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of Gab" by David Short in the Karolinum Press edition.

…I'm a corresponding member of the Academy of Rambling-on, a student at the Department of Euphoria, my god is Dionysos, a drunken, sensuous young man, jocundity given human form, my church father is the ironic Socrates, who patiently engages with anybody so as to lead them by the tongue and through language to the very threshold of nescience, my first-born is Jaroslav Hašek, the inventor of the cock-and-bull story and a fertile genius and scribe who added human flesh to the firmament of prose and left writing to others, …

— from Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab by Bohumil Hrabal
English translation by David Short
Afterword by Václav Kadlec
Illustrations by Jiří Grus
Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 978-80-246-2316-0


The end of this paragraph in Heim's translation is "and his human qualities made the others feel uncomfortable with their pens." When I hear cock-and-bull story, though, Laurence Sterne is the first name to come to mind. Heim's translation has a slightly different take—"inventor of the beer-hall story"—that sounds better, but even there I would argue with Hrabal about this. Over a pint in the pub, of course. But then, maybe that's what he intended.

Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab by Bohumil Hrabal

Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab by Bohumil Hrabal
English translation by David Short
Afterword by Václav Kadlec
Illustrations by Jiří Grus
Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 978-80-246-2316-0

Dear colleagues and friends,

On the occasion of 100th anniversary of Bohumil Hrabal's birth, we would like to present two new additions to the Fiction Series. The collection of stories entitled Rukověť pábitelského učně (Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab) contains Bohumil Hrabal's 1970s short stories. They are mostly texts written in and inspired by the community in Kersko. Our collection strives to recreate the author's original intentions, and thus presents even the stories left out due to the 1970s censorship.

Both Czech and English language versions are accompanied by Jiří Grus's original illustrations.

(from the Karolinum Press website)

One afternoon I was in a little restaurant/bar listening to a truck driver tell the most wonderful stories. No matter how outlandish or grotesque the tales, he could sell them as having really happened. Like the time he crested a hill in backwoods Arkansas and plowed into a herd of sheep…when you laugh at a man describing how he used a tire tool to pry dead sheep from his wheel wells you know you’re listening to a master storyteller.

I thought of that truck driver—what it takes and what it means to be a master storyteller—as I read these wonderful stories by Bohumil Hrabal. My posts on Hrabal have made it clear how much I enjoy his books, and this collection of short stories may be my favorite yet. The reader is immersed in the sylvan Kersko settlement located in Bohemia, where the forest, cottages, byres, and pubs are populated with memorable people and animals.

And the characters…ah, these creations are wonderful. There’s an old man with wild hair who enjoys watching his goats fight over the window seat of the car when he drives them to pasture. There’s two friends, both paralyzed below the waist, who share an insatiable love for life and beer—one of them permanently keeps a bottle-opener hanging from a string on his wheelchair. There’s a friend with the best intentions in the world repeatedly messing everything up, not to mention frequently missing a turn in the road and wrecking his car. There’s a nun who lovingly deals with her damaged wards. These characters are poignant and surprisingly real, expanding to a third dimension outside of the page.

The stories are funny and often frivolous, but they also take on a serious and bittersweet tone when broken dreams of what might have been come into play. Dark and troubling components, barely lurking beneath the surface, add ambiguity on how to read Hrabal’s stories. I’ll focus on some recurring themes in these stories that highlight that ambiguity.

Hrabal had a reputation for sitting in the pub, closely watching what went on around him and engaging in spirited conversations. The funniest stories in this collection usually involve a pub (or drinking in general) and the narrator’s neighbors and friends. The two paralyzed friends, for example, demonstrate a beautiful testament to true friendship. Friendships take on added dimensions as other components are added, though. Pranks played by friends on each other make the reader question if there is any difference in how they would treat people they despise. The mood swings of a pub owner make one narrator question if the two were really friends, acknowledging he goes through the same swings, treating his own friends the same way at times (although he forgives him during his next "up" swing). The loss of a friend in a story leads to a question of who was going to amuse the pub goers now, as if the value of a friend is solely based on entertainment value.

Entertainment value leads to a side-topic—the role of alcohol in these stories. The narrator of “Lucy and Polly” tells us that

from six o’clock onwards the sole preoccupation of any true man of Kresko and its forests is to spend a pleasant evening over a pint in the pub, and all the banter and chit-chat, the arguments and imbecilities are a brilliant way to unwind from our daily tribulations…”. (229)

Alcohol provides not just a social lubricant or relaxation but a form of entertainment in itself. Pub patrons laugh at each other’s misfortunes on their way home from a night of drinking. In my favorite story, “Beatrice,” the narrator describes children with mental and physical defects as having a “mantle of mercy” around them, shielding them from the horrors of their life. Alcohol provides a similar “mantle of mercy” for many of the characters in these stories as dreams are broken and power is wielded arbitrarily against them. In the extended opening sentence of “An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of Gab,” which takes up almost the whole story, the narrator extols the usefulness of doing silly things like getting drunk “while there’s still plenty of time,” but also hints at the worthlessness of his life that such behavior masks. It’s one of many double-edged swords Hrabal wields in his stories.

The greatest ambiguity, though, comes in the role of storytelling. The collection of stories in this book is a testament and celebration of the art of storytelling. Questions about storytelling’s role in society and its purpose for listeners keep bubbling up in the text. The best storytellers in these stories usually have some sort of damage. In “Fining Salami” the storyteller talks about how great life was until his wife left. The narrator remarks that his stories have been repeated many times, not just to provide comfort but more than likely an escape. Details in stories that should cause shame reveal a type of pride, allowing the teller to share his embarrassment while embellishing what happened. Since many of the stories deal with a distant past, they seem to afford the teller a way to revel in youth again. While the stories offer a wistful look back, they often provide a painful comparison with the present.

The story of the troubled children mentioned in “Beatrice” provides a good example of the ambiguity in Hrabal’s use of storytelling. The narrator lovingly describes the children and their behavior, but he seems to revel in their pitiful situation since it provides a great story. When the narrator asks Sister Beatrice if it would have been better if the children had never been born, she replies “Homer was born blind,” a non sequitur given the dire condition of these kids. Instead of applying her reply to the children, though, the narrator reflects on how Homer continues to live through his stories. Many of these tales highlight characters who similarly seem to want to live on forever through their tales. Since Hrabal saw the state destroy entire printing runs of his books, it’s difficult not to apply this situation to him, too. As the narrator in “Beatrice” reflects, there is a “sacred radiance that irradiates everything” making what happens beautiful and breathtaking, but it is memory and storytelling that makes it last beyond the fleeting moment.

This collection of stories was originally subject to the Czechoslovakian censors. As in his other books, Hrabal’s subversion wavers between subtle jabs and over-the-top farce. The local police commandant, his chest full of medals, makes several appearances in these stories (once as a narrator). The villagers acquiesce to the arbitrary whims of officials and silly laws. I get the feeling that Hrabal isn’t necessarily political, it’s just that his experience with Communists provides so much rich material. There’s not many places you can read a great line like “We guard the substance of socialism against the foe, even if that foe turns out to be a feral cow.” Hrabal turns out to be an equal-opportunity lampooner, though. As Václav Kadlec points out in the Afterword, Hrabal focuses on the materialism of Czechs in his stories. While there is a subtle “West is best” message, providing soft jibes at the centrally guided state, Hrabal also highlights the dark side in consumerism. One narrator’s friend, obsessed with finding bargains, is “in reality a poor wretch who wished not to have to contemplate the pointlessness of not only his life but all life.” That escapism, whether through shopping, storytelling, or alcohol, provides a central theme to these stories.

There’s more in these stories, including echoes of history and meditations on eventual death, for the reader to explore. Thanks to Karolinum Press for putting out another wonderful book (and the University of Chicago Press for distributing it in the U.S.). I think this collection would be an excellent starting point for a reader wanting an introduction to Hrabal's writing. Very highly recommended.


Note: I’m working on getting a copy of Jiří Menzel’s movie version of “The Snowdrop Festival” that has English subtitles. I’ll post on it if I’m successful.
Update: my notes on the movie can be found here.
Update: an excerpt from what Hrabal originally had as the introduction to the collection of stories, where he credits Jaroslav Hašek as the inventor of the cock-and-bull story. Or is it the beer-hall story?

Illustration by Jiří Grus
Picture source

Note: A version of this review is also posted at The Mookse and the Gripes.

Update: There have been plenty of pieces written in celebration of what would have been Hrabal's 100th birthday this year. I'll include a few links from Radio Prague I have enjoyed:

• Acclaimed 20th century author Bohumil Hrabal remembered on 100th anniversary of his birth
• Filmmaker Jan Kaplan: Hrabal was one of most modest people I ever met
• Paul Wilson: Pure humour without jokes in 1970s Prague

ICA talks: Bohumil Hrabal and Julian Barnes, in conversation

Another post from the Institute of Contemporary Arts recordings. This one is from May 17, 1990, with Julian Barnes introducing and conversing (through a translator) with Bohumil Hrabal. The “conversation” is a little disjointed at times because of the need for translation, changes in plans on what to present, and Hrabal’s recent bout with the flu. Even so there are some gems here that I enjoyed. The timing of the conversation was to coincide with the recent release of I Served the King of England into English (my copy of it with a translation by Paul Wilson shows a 1989 copyright date).

If you need more on Hrabal’s life, this entry at the Private Prague Guide gives a good overview of his life. Some notes on the conversation:

In Julian Barnes’ introduction I liked his description of Hrabal’s style as operating “a sort of dancing realism.” I have no idea what it means exactly, but it does seem to capture his style. Barnes also mentions Hrabal’s three-volume autobiography, written from the viewpoint of his wife. Barnes expressed his wish that the autobiography would be translated, to which I can only second it.

Hrabal opens with some anecdotes about his family. It turns out Hrabal descended from a wounded French soldier for whom the local Czech girls provided *really good* care. Hrabal’s father had no intent of marrying his mother. When Hrabal's mother told her father that she was pregnant with Bohumil, he intended to kill her. Hrabal’s grandmother put an end to the conflict in a rational way—she told her husband and daughter that their soup was getting cold. Hrabal uses this and a quote from John Barth to demonstrate that he comes by his style biologically.

Hrabal also attributes failing two years of school due to failed exams to extending his childhood. His favorite books when growing up? He enjoyed reading Dumas. But because he lived in a brewery while growing up, he also enjoyed reading cookbooks. When studying at University he focused on ‘recent’ Russian and American literature. He fell hard for Chekov, later discovering Dostoevsky. On the American side he enjoyed Erskine Cauldwell, Ring Laudner, and William Saroyan. (Make of it what you will, but the confluence of social issues and satire seem to set the right tone for Hrabal’s work.) Hrabal initially focused on poetry, writing for friends or girls he wanted to impress.

Hrabal admits that before World War II his life was comfortable. Once the Germans invaded and interrupted his studies, he became a train dispatcher, which gave him plenty of time to read. He doesn’t hide the fact that after World War II he joined the Communist Party for six months. He does say that he stupidly followed the surrealist artists he admired at the time. During his stint in the party he was named cultural leader for a particular district. He was supposed to open the meetings, but his openings were so bad that after being thanked for his effort he was told his services were no longer needed. After leaving the party he moved to Prague and became a worker in a steel mill.

At this point he was reading more American writers, both their works and personal stories. He loved poets like Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. The first short story he wrote was about a girl that delivered snacks and drinks to factory workers. He joined a literary group led by Jiří Kolář, who told Hrabal the group needed a novelist and that would be his role. Since Hrabal's poetry had been completely ignored he focused on prose writing instead. He described one of his latest works (Total Fears: Letters to Dubenka, or, as he called it, Letters to April) the equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting: drippings done in a frantic style.

Despite the disjointed nature at times it’s still a fun listen. In addition, Barnes reads several pages from I Served the King of England (the section that provides the title of the book).

Off the wagon

Yet another preorder...I've fallen off the wagon on limiting my purchases. Not that I'm complaining, too much. Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal (translated from the Czech by Stacey Knecht) is scheduled to be released by Archipelago Books later this year.

An excerpt can be found at Asymptote journal.

Larks on a String (1969 movie: Czechoslovakia)

Continuing with my sort-of-bi-weekly foreign movie posts for this year...
For more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up.

The IMDb.com page for this movie can be found here.

Bohumil Hrabal has been a favorite author of mine recently. Adapted for the screen by Hrabal and Jiří Menzel and directed by Menzel, this movie is a delight to watch. It captures Hrabal’s style well—he takes a depressing topic like life under Communism and focuses on the beauty of life, especially among offbeat characters, amid the travesty. A quick history on the film—Menzel and Hrabal filmed this in 1968 during the upheaval of that year in Czechoslovakia, only to have it suppressed by the new Communist regime. When the Communist regime fell the movie was officially released in 1990. Unfortunately several of the original scenes, censored during an attempt at an official release earlier, were saved only on deteriorating second copies.

I watched the movie from Second Run DVD, which is quickly becoming a favorite source for movies. Menzel filmed a 10 minute answer session on the film in which he provided the genesis for the format of the movie:

“The screenplay of Larks on a String is based on a book of short stories. All the stories have the same location but different characters. What was important was to make a coherent screenplay based on all those different characters. Hrabal used to say, ‘We have to plait it all into one braid.’” When we were looking for a way to link the separate storylines, how to unite these various characters, I remembered an old political joke from the ‘50s: The workers are ordered to attend a meeting where a comrade gives a lecture explaining, ‘In the present, we have socialism, but in the future we will have communism.’ After the lecture, he asks the workers if they have any questions. One of the workers raises his hand and says, ‘It’s good that we have socialism and will soon have communism, but where is the bread, where is the milk, where is the butter?’ The comrade answers, ‘This is a rather complicated question. Ask me again at the next lecture.’ A week later, the workers are ordered to attend another meeting, and the same thing happens—the comrade extols the virtues of socialism and communism, and afterwards asks if anyone has any questions. Another worker raises his hand and says, ‘It’s good we have socialism and will soon have communism, but where is the bread, where is the milk, where is the butter, and where is the worker who asked about this last time?’ So this old political joke gave us the key to the whole structure of the screenplay."

Considering the source is from short stories the movie doesn’t feel disjointed at all, uniting the various stories that unfold into the one braid Hrabal wanted. The setting begins in the late summer of 1950 (a reference is made to the Battle of Pusan in the Korean War at the start of the movie...although it's hard to ignore the same set of clothing is used regardless of different seasons) in the steel-manufacturing city of Kladno. We see the workers at a scrapyard, assigned to this dirty task for political reasons. Included in the group is a philosophy professor who refused to shred decadent Western texts, a public prosecutor who believed a defendant deserved a defense, an entrepreneur who had the gall to employ other workers, a barber that proved to be redundant since the country officially had 60% too many barbers, a professional musician because he played a bourgeois instrument (the saxophone), and a cook who refused to work on Saturdays. Voluntarily joining the group was a dairy farmer who closed his farm in order to help the state, although his idealism proved he would be the first casualty from the group.

Female prisoners also work in the scrapyard, serving a labor sentence for trying to defect. The guard overseeing the prisoners is about to be married to a free-spirited girl, someone who would rather dance with members of the gypsy band instead of participating in the formal wedding feast. The political supervisor running the scrapyard brags about his working-class past (while symbolically helping toss scrap into the rail-carts) and his concern for hygienic practices, the latter of which includes his penchant for bathing pubescent girls. Hrabal and Menzel even show the political boss' humanity, with a very awkward and depressing home scene where he drunkenly hopes to please his children. Here and elsewhere the banality of oppression is on full display.

Glimpses of the need for human contact shine through in the movie, ranging from the simple touching of hands to sex under the barbed wire of the prison. Despite the government's attempts the Communist symbolism of the junkyard, scrap being melted down into high-grade steel, doesn’t carry over to the melting down of people into a new human form designed to serve the state. The scrapyard became a failure when quotas were raised while the people never lower their resistance to indoctrination and control.

I’ve mentioned in previous foreign movie posts (or at least in the comments) that I wonder about the translation of cultural items in a movie. A few that stood out here was the graffiti scrawled in chalk, probably to offset the propaganda posters’ banal sayings. Another example: the supervisor upbraides workers not wanting to “get closer to socialism—what would the author of ‘Red Fire over Kladno’ think?” Sounds like a Communist tract that didn’t survive until the Velvet Revolution. What does translate well is the propaganda, especially that used in indoctrinating children. A teacher and her class arrive at the scrapyard to distribute red kerchiefs (May Day, perhaps?):

”The situation has worsened due to imperialists who are using our reactionaries for their evil aims. [Pointing to the female prisoners] Look at those repugnant, imperialism soaked faces. The fascist beast never sleeps. They stick their snouts into our blossoming garden. They exploit these monsters for subversion. We stopped them defecting to their benefactors. Keep away from them. Don’t be like one man who got in and impregnated an inmate. Another decadent capitalist soul for the world! We’re too kind! It seems that work discipline is vanishing.”

To which the philosopher replies: “No wonder. What’s more important is that real people are vanishing. Not just abstract, but real people are disappearing.”

I have many more notes, such as the symbolism of typewriters and crucifixes being thrown in the carts for melting down. I'll stop, though, with one philosophy discussion that ties in to the final scene. While the male workers are walking at night and discussing Kant (among other things), a man falls in an open latrine: “This is man’s glory! His head full of ideals, his feet stuck in shit! Victory is one big shithouse.”

Highly recommended.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabil
Translation by Michael Henry Heim
Harcourt Brace & Company

I have enjoyed the works of Bohumil Hrabal to date and that streak continues with Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. An 117-page sentence from an old shoemaker/brewmaster to some young ladies (he directly addresses them over a dozen times), the book wanders through many topics but often centers on his experiences. Not that he’s always nice to the young ladies, telling one that she’ll need falsies if she wants to be in a play with him while at the same time he tells her friend that she’ll do for a role even if she isn’t beautiful. Jirka paints himself as the hero of many vignettes while extolling his memory, yet he can’t get Jesus’ miracle at the Cana wedding correct—was the mistake meant as irony or to cast doubt on Jirka’s stories? Like many of his tales, the ambiguity makes his talk engaging. His rambling sometimes follows a related stream of consciousness, other times there is no relationship between topics.

There are several topics Jirka returns to over and over, such as Batista’s book on safeguarding marital bliss and sexual hygiene. Bondy the poet, pushing his two kids in a baby buggy, makes several appearances in his conversation, as does Anna Nováková’s book of interpreting dreams. Jirka regales the ladies with his love life, although he ends most anecdotes with him turning down offers so he will remain chaste or at least keep his freedom. The question lingers, though, with just what is Jirka trying to accomplish with the young ladies? He’s already confessed “I can’t resist the charms of a beautiful woman”. At the same time he believes advice given in Batista's book: “Mr. Batista’s book says a twenty-year-old beauty gives any healthy young man a charge though she’s no more use to an old man than an overcoat is to a corpse”.

Other topics get many mentions—Jirka seems to be quite the connoisseur of great art and popular culture. Like most garrulous narrators, what he reveals between the words and what he leaves out of his tales proves to be as important as what he recounts. At times his stories take a dark turn or have somber details. Even in these instances, Jirka's liveliness buoys his talk.

Some quotes to give you a flavor of his rambling:
• [P]ublic opinion is made by idiots and drunks

• [M]en were still gallant in those days, a professor once said to me, We never gave the monarchy its due, he said, We never gave the brothels their due, our men had too much vital force in them, it made them supersensitive

• [A] butcher has to watch himself as well, we had one in our platoon by the name of Kocourek, Miroslav Kocourek, and this Kocourek had a bandaged finger, and one day he was stuffing liverwursts and the bandage disappeared into one of them, and because chances were an enlisted man would get the one with the bandage he forgot about it, but guess what, young ladies, it was the doctor! That’s right, he was on his third liverwurst, and the minute he cut into it he recognized his handiwork and puked and Kocourek was sent to the front, bud did he die there? No, he turned hero and won all kinds of medals

• [W]hat I’m giving you now, young ladies, are like windows on the world, points, goals, scores, the principle the late Strauss applied to his heavenly melodies, sending them out into the world to refine the emotions, … because our refined emotions require us to compose a farewell melody or poem to be dispatched with a bouquet of roses

• [W]hich must be why Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you’d forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your hadkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant ot put you to sleep, it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out

• I found a schoolmaster’s daughter who would do it for a nice white roll, but all I had was our army bread, so she kissed my hand…I was always the gentleman, which is why I was in correspondence with Europe’s finest beauties

• [T]hree days later I was off to Dalmatia and the sea, you should have seen the storm that came up, when nature goes wild like that and gets into a man’s pants it’s enough to turn him into a poet

• [A] dandy of a Jew gave me a gulden to shine up his belt and his gun for him, he was going into town to establish some international relations, as he put it, but along came our beast of a Sergeant Brčul, six and a half feet of bad blood, and said, Where’s the Jew boy? Went to town, I said, well, the Serge he starts cursing…because Freiherr von Wucherer had expressly forbidden soldiers from going on rampages in town, so he comes and lies down in the Jew’s bed and when the Jew staggers back after midnight, totally beat, Brčul leaps up, knocks him down, kicks him all over the floor in his special uniform, and when I went out to relieve him I found him swinging in the wind, hanging up by his own hand and shiny belt, nobody appreciates that kind of thing anymore
(the suicide or the shiny belt?)

• [A] fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things things and not only for my country but for all mankind

• [T]he doctors had to amputate his member and insert a silver tube in its place, so you see, young ladies, you can have all the riches in the world and still lack what matters most

• (Jirka ends his story where he started, reminding me of the path of epicycles astronomers had to manufacture to explain an earth-centric universe. This quote is the opening of the book.)Just like I come here to see you, young ladies, I used to go to church to see my beauties, well, not exactly to church, I’m not much of a churchgoer, but to a small shop next to the parish house, a tiny little place, where a man by the name of Altman sold secondhand sewing machines, dual-spring Victrolas from America, and Minimax fire extinguishers, and this Altman he had a sideline delivering beauties to pubs and bars all over the district, and the young ladies would sleep in Altman’s back room, or when summer came they set up tents in the garden and the dean of the church would take his constitutional along the fence and those show-offs would put a Victrola out there and sing and smoke and tan themselves in their bathing suits, a sight for sore eyes it was, a heavenly sight, Eden on earth

• (Now the end of the book—Jirka picks up the initial thought and reveals that story-telling to young ladies is nothing new. It turns out the young ladies are sunbathing, inspiring him to start his story.)[S]o anyway, ladies, there I was, sitting on my Minimax fire extinguisher case, while six beauties lolling in the sun listened to my stories and the dean of the church standing on his watering can with one arm over the fence stared at me like I was an apparition while in fact I was only a loyal reader of the illustrated weeklies and Havlíček and Mr. Batista’s book on sexual hygiene

Update (13 Feb 2014): A better overall review by Gabe Habash is available at the Publishers Weekly blog.

Picture source
The apparent movement of sun and planets with earth as center, much like Jirka's storytelling style

I Served the King of England

From the back cover of the New Directions edition:

First published in 1971 as a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I served the King of England is a comic novel telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a German woman athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition by building his own hotel. He becomes a millionaire; but with the arrival of communism, he loses everything. Sent to inspect mountain roads, Ditie comes to terms with his dreary circumstances, his place in history, and the inevitability of his death.

Well, yes, but it’s so much more. The height of Ditie’s ambition is his wish to be accepted and respected, especially by other hotel owners. He earns his million and develops his hotel visited by famous guests but never attains the acceptance or respect of other hotel owners. The owners visit his hotel but ignore Ditie and the hotel’s most fabulous attractions. Later, when millionaires are rounded up for jail, Ditie takes offense that he is excluded from their ranks. But the book is about so much more than his ambition. In the background lies the history of Czechoslovakia under Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, the German occupation of Bohemia, German atrocities during World War II (including the destruction of Lidice), and the communist takeover early in 1948.

Everyone longs for something in the book but Ditie moves beyond trying to fulfill physical pleasures and seeks his place in the world, during life and death. He initially learns to “read” people as a pupil of the headwaiter at a Prague hotel, who perceptively understands each patron and his desires. When asked how he correctly analyzes a customer and knows so much in advance, the headwaiter responds “I served the King of England.” Ditie’s experience highlights how meaningless such an honor can be—after serving the Emperor of Ethiopia (accidentally at first, then by the Emperor’s choice) Ditie is suspected of stealing a gold spoon. His honor in ruins, he unsuccessfully attempts to hang himself.

Underneath the comic and dramatic events lies a dark aspect of man. Ditie does not evaluate his acquisition of wealth through the theft of valuable stamps from the Jews until bad things happen to him. He doesn’t think twice about abandoning his autistic son, the product of approved coupling by the Third Reich, until haunted by the boy’s talent. The millionaires’ prison receives Hrabal’s special scorn. Despite describing the behavior in the running of the prison as “real comedy, beyond Chaplin’s wildest imagination”, there lies a depressing aspect of man willing to forego freedom for a soft life. Ditie gives up his freedom because he wants to be accepted as one of the rich (this after his humiliation in order to marry a German woman). Hrabal’s scorn is balanced when Ditie’s work assignments take him to the border, where he begins to understand his place in history. Ditie earns more knowledge of human nature than the headwaiter claimed to have from serving the King of England. Ditie’s knowledge, though, comes through solitude and reflection and demonstrates that the unbelievable really can true.

The moment I looked out and saw, to my surprise, how high the snow had reached, I saw my cottage with the animals in it suspended on a chain hung from heaven itself, a cottage banished from the world and yet full to the brim, just like those mirrors with their buried and gorgotten images, images that could be summoned up as easily as the images I put in the mirrors, as the images I littered and lined my road with, covered now by the snow of the past, so that memory could find it only by touch, the way an experienced hand feels the pulse under the skin, to determine where life had flowed, flows, and will flow. And at that moment I began to be afraid, because if I died, all the unbelievable things that had come true would vanish, and I remembered that the professor of aesthetics and French literature had said that the better person was the one who expressed himself better. And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the falling snow that had half buried the cottage. And so every evening, when I sat in front of the mirror with the cat behind me on the bar, butting her little head against my image in the mirror as though the image were really me, I looked at my hands while the blizzard roared outside like a swollen river, and the longer I looked at my hands—and I would hold them up as though I were surrendering to myself—the more I saw winter ahead of me, and snow. I saw that I would shovel the snow, throwing it aside, searching for the road, and go on, every day, searching for the road to the village, and perhaps they would be looking for a way to get to me too. And I said to myself that during the day I would look for the road to the village, but in the evening I would write, looking for the road back, and then walk back along it and shovel aside the snow that had covered my past, and so try, by writing, to ask myself about myself.
(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

Highest recommendation.

For additional excerpts from the novel:

It was a magnificent sight

Worthy of inseminating an Aryan with dignity

A match saved with his energetic whistle

I’m going to skip reviewing the movie version of the novel (there are many changes from the text, often to good effect) directed by Jiri Menzel, other than to recommend it—very enjoyable.

I Served the King of England: a match saved with his energetic whistle

A Christmas Eve entry in the series of excerpts from Bohumil Hrabal’s fantastic tale, where the unbelievable routinely comes true. At times the plot feels like a rickety framework on which to hang anecdotes such as the following…not that I’m complaining.

While in the prison for millionaires (more on this in the next post), Ditie reminisces about experiences and acquaintances. As the absurd becomes routine, Ditie’s memories focus on events that make sense to the (mildly) insane. This quote starts with a vision of Zdeněk when he was the headwaiter of the Hotel Tichota:

On our day off we’d gone for a walk, and in a grove of birches we saw a small man darting among the trees, blowing his whistle, pointing, holding the trees at arm’s length, and shouting, You’ve done it again, Mr. Říha. One more time and you’re out of the game. Then he ran back and forth among the trees again. Zdeněk found this amusing, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on. That evening Zdeněk told me the man was Mr. Šíba, the soccer referee. At the time, no one wanted to referee a Sparta-Slavia match, because the crowd then always insulted the referee, so Mr. Šíba said that if no one else wanted the job he’d referee the game himself. He went into training for it in this birch grove, running about sowing confusion among the birches, reprimanding and threatening Burger and Braine with expulsion, but mostly yelling at Mr. Říha, one more time and you’re out of the game. That afternoon Zdeněk took a bus full of inmates from an asylum for the mildly lunatic who had permission to go into the village because it was fair time, and they could ride on the merry-go-round and swing on the swings in their striped clothes and bowler hats. Zdeněk went into a pub and bought them a barrel of beer and a spigot, borrowed some half-liter glasses, and took them to the birch grove, where they broached the barrel and drank while Mr. Šíba ran among the birch trees blowing his whistle. The lunatics watched him for a while, then, figuring out what he was doing, they began to shout, cheer, and yell out the names of all the famous players for Sparta and Slavia. They even saw Braine kick Plániček in the head, and they jeered until Mr. Šíba threw Braine out of the game. Finally, after the referee had warned Říha three ttimes, there was nothing he could do but toss him out of the game for fouling Jezbera. The lunatics cheered, and by the time we’d polished off the barrel of beer they weren’t the only ones shouting, because I too saw the striped uniforms and the red-and-white uniforms instead of birch trees as the tiny referee Mr. Šíba blew his whistle. When it was over, the lunatics carried him off the playing field on their shoulders for doing such a beautiful job of refereeing. A month later Zdeněk showed me an article in the paper aabout Mr. Šíba, who had thrown Braine and Říha out of a game and thus saved the match with his energetic whistle.

(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

I Served the King of England: worthy of inseminating an Aryan with dignity

Bohumil Hrabal’s fantastic tale takes a dark turn as World War II begins. Ditie loses his job in Prague when he falls in love with a German. Even as Hrabal describes an absurd setting, an ugly edge creeps in with his humor. I’m providing another long excerpt to give an idea of his blending the two. In this scene, Ditie has proposed to his German girlfriend. Before he can accept, Ditie must get her father’s permission, which also includes a state blessing:

And so the unbelievable came true, because in Cheb I had to undergo an examination by a Supreme Court judge and I submitted a written request in which I listed my entire family, going back beyond that cemetery in Cvikov where Grandpa Johan Ditie lay, and with reference to his Aryan and Teutonic origins I respectfully requested permission to marry Elisabeth Papánek. According to the laws of the Reich, I also had to request a physical examination by an SS doctor to determine whether I, being of a different nationality, was eligible under the Nuremberg Laws not merely to have sex with someone of Aryan Teutonic blood but actually to impregnate her. And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German—which I couldn’t understand, though I got the gist well enough—when some stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb. He added that the gob of phlegm a German woman would spit between my eyes would be as much a disgrace to her as an honor to me. And I knew from reading the papers that on the very same day that I was standing here with my penis in my hand to prove myself worthy to marry a German, Germans were executing Czechs, and so I couldn’t get an erection and offer the doctor a few drops of my sperm. Then the door opened and the doctor came in with my papers in his hand, and he’d probably just read them and realized who I was, because he said to me affably, Herr Ditie, was ist den los? And he patted me on the shoulder, handed me some photographs, and turned on the light. I found myself looking at pornographic snapshots of naked people, and whenever I’d had this kind of picture in my hands before I’d always turn stiff right away, but now the more I looked at them the more I saw those headlines and the stories in the papers announcing that so-and-so and four others had been sentenced to death and shot, and there were more of them every day, new ones, innocent ones. And here I was standing with my penis in my hand and pornographic snapshots in the other, so I put them down on the table, because I still couldn’t manage to do what I was asked. Finally a young nurse had to come in and after a few deft strokes of her hand, during which I didn’t have to think about anything anymore, she carried off two beads of my sperm on a piece of paper, and half an hour later they were pronounced first-class and worthy of inseminating an Aryan vagina with dignity. And so the Bureau for the Defense of German Honor and Blood could find no objection to my marrying an Aryan of German blood. With a mighty thumping of rubber stamps I was given a marriage license, while Czech patriots, with the same thumping of the same rubber stamps, were sentenced to death.

(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

I Served the King of England: It was a magnificent sight

I wanted to pass on this extended quote from Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England because it captures the element of his comic madness. Ditie, a (short in stature) waiter-in-training at the Golden Prague Hotel and Restaurant, asks a traveling salesman representing a tailoring firm from Padubice why he cuts strips of parchment with measurements written on them for the suit jacket. The salesman tells Ditie about the “revolutionary technique” his

boss invented, the first in the republic, maybe even in Europe and the whole world, and it’s for officers and actors and the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands, like yourself, sir. I just measure them and send the measurements to the workshop, where they take those strips and sew them together on a kind of tailor’s dummy with a rubber bladder inside it that’s gradually pumped up until the parchment strips are filled out, and then they’re covered with fast-drying glue so they harden in the shape of your torso. When they remove the bladder, your torso floats up to the ceiling of the room, permanently inflated, and they tie a cord to it, the way they do to babies in the maternity wards so they won’t get mixed up, or the way they tag the toes of corpses in the morgues of the big Prague hospitals. Then when your turn comes, they pull your torso down and try the dresses, the uniforms, the suit coats, or whatever’s been ordered, on those mannequins, and they sew and refit, sew and refit, unstitching the seams and sewing them again, without a single live fitting. Since it’s all done on this inflated stand-in, of course the coat fits like a glove, and we can mail it out postage-free or C.O.D. with confidence, and it always fits, unless the client gains or loses weight. If that happens, the salesman can simply come again and measure how much you’ve lost or gained, and then the mannequin is taken in or let out at the appropriate places, and the clothes are altered accordingly, or a new coat or tunic is made. And a client’s mannequin is up there among several hundred colorful torsos, until he dies. You can find what you’re looking for by rank and profession, because the firm has divided everything into sections—for generals and lieutenants colonels and colonels and captains and lieutenants and headwaiters and anyone who wears formal dress—and all you have to do is come and pull on the right string and the mannequin comes down like a child’s balloon and you can see exactly how someone looked when he last had a jacket or a tuxedo made to measure or altered.

How does Ditie react to this absurdity? With even more silliness:

All this made me long for a new tuxedo made by that company, and I was determined to buy one as soon as I got my waiter’s papers, so that I and my mannequin could float near the ceiling of a company that was certainly the only one of its kind in the world, since no one but a Czech could have come up with an idea like that. After that I often dreamed about how I personally, not my torso, was floating up there by the ceiling of the Pardubice tailoring firm, and sometimes I felt as though I were floating near the ceiling of the Golden City of Prague restaurant.

Ditie orders a tuxedo from the tailoring firm and goes to pick up the suit in person, asking where his

inflated figurine, my torso, was. The boss of the place was as short as I was, and seemed to understand that I wanted to be taller, and how important being up there among the other torsos near the storeroom ceiling was for me, so he took me there to see it. It was a magnificent sight. Up near the ceiling hung the torsos of generals and regimental commanders and famous actors. Hans Albers [the German actor] himself had his suits made here, so he was up there too. A draft from an open window made the torsos move about like little fleecy clouds in an autumn wind. A thin thread bearing a name tag dangled down from every torso, and the tags danced gaily in the breeze, like fish on a line. The boss pointed at a tag with my name and address on it, so I pulled it down. It looked so small, my torso. I almost wept to see a major general’s torso beside mine, and Mr. Beránek the hotelkeeper’s, but when I thought of the company I was in I laughed and felt better.

So far the plot is almost an afterthought, a loose framework for yarns like this one. The spirit of Hrabal’s anecdotes leads the reader to accept the quirky and fantastic as possible.

(Quotes from the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

For another take on the fantastic as possible, watch this scene from the movie version under Jirí Menzel's direction (which takes some liberty with the book, mostly by understating the waiter's reaction):

Too Loud a Solitude

After seeing glowing reviews of the works of Bohumil Hrabal, I thought I would read one of his books. Expect to see several more posts on his works over the next few months—I thoroughly enjoyed Too Loud a Solitude. Welcome to the world of Haňtá, a trash compactor in Prague, turning out compressed bales of paper for the last thirty-five years. Haňtá reveals that his two loves in the world are books and beer, items he feels are necessities for his work and his learning. It’s questionable at first whether he understands the books he rescues from the compactor and takes home to read. It becomes clear that he not only understands the books, they have become part of him, leaving a mark on his soul. No longer able to tell which “thoughts come from me and which from my books” (page 1) he sees himself as a bale of compacted thoughts he has received from his books. Haňtá makes use of his learning to add to his unique way of looking and acting in the world around him, although his subtle subversion, born of a naiveté despite the self-scholoarship, sets him apart from others.

Haňtá hopes that the books he saves from the compactor will tell him more about himself. His apartment becomes so filled with books that he can barely maneuver around the many stacks. He has added shelves everywhere, including above his bed where the weight of his books would crush him in his sleep if they happened to fall. Haňtá accepts whatever comes his way with unquestioning gratitude, highlighting a tension between his ideals and what he is willing to do to obtain them:

I don’t like baths even though we have a shower room right behind the boss’s office, because if I had a bath I’d be sure to come down with something. I have to go easy on the hygiene, working with my bare hands: I can’t wash them until night, because if I washed them several times a day my skin would crack. But sometimes, when a yearning for the Greek ideal of beauty comes over me, I’ll wash one of my feet or maybe even my neck, then the next week I’ll wash the other foot and an arm, and whenever a major religious holiday is in the offing, I’ll do my chest and both feet, but in that case I take an antihistamine in advance, because otherwise I’ll have hay fever even if there’s snow on the ground. (pages 25-6, all quotes from the Harvest Book/Harcourt, Inc. edition, translation by Michael Henry Heim)

Hrabal’s condemnation of censorship saves the most bite for its indoctrination of others to participate. Haňtá believes “inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.” (page 2) The paper trash he receives to compact regularly includes books, but they are mostly discarded works (although the works from the Royal Prussian Library proves to be a special exception). Not until he visits a new powerful compactor does he see organized censorship—entire runs of books, still in their packing boxes, fed into the machine. Hrabal’s picture of the visiting schoolchildren, hurting themselves while enthusiastically ripping apart the books to be fed into the compactor, is disheartening. Even so, Haňtá scurries home and tries to mimic the bigger, more efficient machine. He has seen the future and tries to maintain his place in such a changed world, regardless of the cost. The joy of the early pages and his fond reminiscing has been replaced by gloom. Haňtá’s abandons turning his bales into works of art (he used to place a book in the middle of the bale opened to a particular page, then cover the bales with posters of art masterpieces) in favor of increased volume, leading to a predictable, but still powerful, ending.

Along the way we meet many wonderfully drawn characters as colorful as Haňtá:

- Haňtá’s uncle, retired from the railway, who installed a signal tower and rail line in his backyard, (shades of Tristram’s Uncle Toby) where his friends can play with a secondhand locomotive and get just as lubricated as the engine.

- Marie, one of his early loves, who can’t seem to escape disastrous run-ins with feces.

- The Gypsy girl who briefly moved in with him, afraid that Haňtá’s kite would fly away with her. (Hrabal draws very affectionate portraits of his Gypsy characters in this book.)

- Haňtá’s old friend, who celebrates getting his boss in trouble through a two-day sobriety by getting drunk.

- The mice, whether in his work basement or in the sewers in the city. Haňtá views them in the same relationship as God views humans.


Highly recommended and as I mentioned earlier I plan to read and post more on works by Hrabal. Here are some links for those interested in exploring more about the author and his books:

James Wood’s article on Hrabal

Article by Mats Larsson, with excerpts from different works

Adam Thirwell on Hrabal (focusing on I Served the King of England but covering his work in general)

The 2007 film adaptation, using puppets, of the novel--not a comprehensive treatment of the book and some liberties are taken to explicitly highlight the political aspects of the novel. I enjoyed it even with the changes.

Update (16 Oct 2020):
Radio Prague International named this one of its Czech Books You Must Read. It's an insightful and informative post that I highly recommend. Here's a comment about the book from Esther Peters, Associate Director of the Center for East European and Russian Studies at the University of Chicago:

“The world would be a better place if more people read this book. It is an incredibly engaging read. It is so much fun and yet it is incredibly intellectual. It makes you think. Every time I read it there are new things to think about and it is one of the few books that I think combines these aspects so perfectly that you can delve into it, love reading it and just enjoy the process of reading.

“It is about knowledge, language, process and ritual, but it is also just a good story. That combination of things is quite rare I think. It challenges you to think, but keeps you entertained at the same time.

“Every time I read it something new pops out. I think that is another thing. It changes with the reader. I think that it probably changed with Hrabal as he wrote it. It is something you can take with you. It is a companion.”

Happy Thanksgiving

Given how things are going right now I need to remind myself, per Steven Riddle, William Michaelian and other wonderful book bloggers...I need to remind myself to take time out to enjoy and appreciate the wonders around me. This includes the pleasures from books...

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

- Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (translation by Michael Henry Heim)