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Remembrance of Things Past
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10269 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1993 |
1,778 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL
Bohumil Hrabal, translated by James Naughton
New York: Pantheon, 1993
302 pp., $23.00
Bohumil Hrabal, one of Czechoslovakia's most acclaimed writers, is perhaps best known to American readers as the author of Closely Watched Trains, a novel that, in 1967, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. More political in theme than many of Hrabal's other works of fiction, the story concerns a young man in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who is killed when he attempts to blow up a German ammunition train. In Hrabal's other tales, although he alludes to political events in Czechoslovakia, he is more interested in exploring the ways in which ordinary people perceive reality and create their own imaginary worlds.
Not until 1989 was Hrabal's fiction available in English translation: first If I Served the King of England, a lighthearted tale of the adventures of a busboy who eventually becomes a successful hotel owner, then Too Loud a Solitude, the fictional memoir of a trash collector who rescues books from destruction. In both works, serious themes underlie humorous, sometimes absurd, episodes in the lives of irrepressible characters. Hrabal's language is earthy and direct, his images vivid and intense, and always evident is his engagement with readers and his love of writing. "My literature and my texts are nothing other than my own remembrance of things past," he wrote in an unpublished autobiography; "the search overwhelms me, but at the same time, it amuses me; in my texts, I put much emphasis on entertainment, on how entertained I am by the difficulty of this quest."
When Hrabal draws upon his memories, he mines a wide range of experiences. His college education was interrupted by the Second World War, when Czechoslovakian universities were shut down during the Nazi occupation. Hrabal spent the war years working as a law clerk, insurance agent, and traveling salesman. After the war, he finished his studies and went on to earn a law degree. But he discovered that the degree was useless under the new communist government. Instead, he worked in a steel mill, a paper-recycling plant, and as a stagehand in a Prague theater. These occupations both supported him and fueled his fiction with a variety of quirky characters.
Like many writers in Eastern Europe, Hrabal had more difficulty publishing his works than writing them. Although many of his poems and
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