(Hantá rescues books from the jaws of his compacting press...)
Hantá rescues books from the jaws of his compacting press and carries them home. Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera calls “our very best writer today,” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Hantá rescues books from the jaws of his compacting press and carries them home. Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera calls “our very best writer today,” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word. Translated by Michael Henry Heim.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156904586/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) betwe...)
In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) between 1989 and 1991 but never sent, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) chronicles the momentous events of those years as seen, more often than not, from the windows of his favorite pubs. In his palavering, stream-of-conscious style that has marked him as one of the major writers and innovators of postwar European literature, Hrabal gives a humorous and at times moving account of life in Prague under Nazi occupation, Communism, and the brief euphoria following the revolution of 1989 when anything seemed possible, even pink tanks. Interspersed are fragmented memories of trips taken to Britain ― as he attempted to track down every location mentioned in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” ― and the United States, where he ends up in one of Dylan Thomas’s haunts comparing the waitresses to ones he knew in Prague. The result is a masterful blend of personal history and fee association rendered in a prose as powerful as it is poetic..
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8090217192/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of ag...)
Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most popular works. Milos Hrma is a timid railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. After receiving acclaim as a novel, Closely Watched Trains was made into a successful film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1967. Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most popular works. Milos Hrma is a timid railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. After receiving acclaim as a novel, Closely Watched Trains was made into a successful film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1967.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810112787/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a s...)
In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia. First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), 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. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081121687X/?tag=2022091-20
2007
(By the writer Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's great...)
By the writer Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's greatest contemporary writer comes a novel (now in English for the first time) peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and sprinkled with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, this novel allows us into the mind of an elderly woman coming to terms with the passing of time. Praise for Too Loud a Solitude: "Short, sharp and eccentric. Sophisticated, thought-provoking and pithy." --Spectator "Unmissable, combines extremes of comedy and seriousness, plus pathos, slapstick, sex and violence all stirred into one delicious brew." --The Guardian "In imaginative riches and sheer exhilaration it offers more than most books twice its size. At once tender and scatological, playful and sombre, moving and irresistibly funny." --The Independent on Sunday Praise for I Served the King of England: "A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude." -- James Wood, The London Review of Books "A comic novel of great inventiveness ... charming, wise, and sad--and an unexpectedly good laugh." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel." --The New York Times "Dancing Lessons unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence. The gambit works. Something about that slab of wordage carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0981955738/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linke...)
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer.” “Cutting It Short” is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Maryška, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Maryška drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. She’s a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The Little Town Where Time Stood Still” is told by Maryška and Francin’s son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new post–World War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life. Together, Hrabal’s rousing and outrageous yarns stand as a hilarious and heartbreaking tribute to the always imperiled sweetness of lust, love, and life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590178408/?tag=2022091-20
2015
(Wonderful stories of Communist Prague by “the masterly Bo...)
Wonderful stories of Communist Prague by “the masterly Bohumil Hrabal” (The New Yorker) Never before published in English, the stories in Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult were written mostly in the 1950s and present the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal at the height of his powers. The stories capture a time when Czech Stalinists were turning society upside down, inflicting their social and political experiments on mostly unwilling subjects. These stories are set variously in the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague; on the raucous and dangerous factory floor of the famous Poldi steelworks where Hrabal himself once worked; in a cacophonous open-air dance hall where classical and popular music come to blows; at the basement studio where a crazed artist attempts to fashion a national icon; on the scaffolding around a decommissioned church. Hrabal captures men and women trapped in an eerily beautiful nightmare, longing for a world where “humor and metaphysical escape can reign supreme.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811224805/?tag=2022091-20
2015
Hrabal was born in Brno on 28 March 1914, in what was then the province of Moravia within Austria-Hungary, to an unmarried mother, Marie Božena Kiliánová. His biological father was Bohumil Blecha, Marie's friend from neighbourhood. Until the age of three, Hrabal lived mainly with his grandparents.
Hrabal received his education at primary school in Nymburk. He also attended a technical secondary school in Nymburk and graduated from Charles University in Prague in 1946.
Hrabal worked a series of jobs before finally venturing into a career as a writer when he was in his late forties. His writing career, however, was frequently interrupted by the changing governments in his homeland, which often tried to suppress his work.
Hrabal's first book was withdrawn a week before publication, in 1959. It was eventually published in 1963, as Pearls of the Deep. In the same year, he became a professional writer. But until he began writing fulltime, he worked as a law clerk, railroad worker, insurance agent, salesperson, foundry worker, paper salvager, and stage hand. His experiences with the railroad influenced his Closely Watched Trains, a novella that he later help adapt as a screenplay. The film version won the 1967 Academy Award for best foreign-language film. The work also brought him international recognition.
In all Hrabal penned more than fifty books of verse, short stories, and novellas. Among these are I Served the King of England, The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, Little Pearl on the Bottom, The Little Town Where Time Has Stopped, and The Subterranean Streams. He wrote a book of memoirs called Dancing Lessons for an Advanced Age.
Hrabal was also a noted raconteur, and much of his story-telling took place in a number of pubs including, most famously, U zlatého tygra (At the Golden Tiger) on Husova Street in Prague.
Hrabal is known as “the grand old man of Czech literature,” and described as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century. His works have been translated into 27 languages.
Hrabal's two best-known novels are Closely Observed Trains (1965) and I Served the King of England (1971), both of which were made into movies by the Czech director Jiří Menzel (in 1966 and 2006, respectively). His Closely Watched Trains, a novella that he later helped adapt as a screenplay, won the 1967 Academy Award for best foreign-language film.
(In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a s...)
2007(By the writer Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's great...)
2014(In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) betwe...)
1992(The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linke...)
2015(Wonderful stories of Communist Prague by “the masterly Bo...)
2015(Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of ag...)
1995(Hantá rescues books from the jaws of his compacting press...)
1992Hrabal married Eliška Plevová (known as "Pipsi" to Hrabal, and referred to by that name in some of his works). In 1965, the couple bought a country cottage in Kersko, near Nymburk; the cottage became home to his numerous cats. Eliška died in 1987.
