Perhaps I came to this book with false misconceptions, trying to compare to Milan Kundera or Joseph Roth, but for whatever reason this just really didn't work for me. It never became alive and,although I enjoy interlinked short stories, was too episodic.
A disappointed reader. ( )

“I Served the King of England” by Bohumil Hrabal is an unusual book/ a fine book/ a splendid book. In 1989 it was translated from Czech by Paul Wilson. In 2008 a movie version garnered high praise. ( I have not yet seen the film: both it and the book have scenes of explicit sex.)

The book’s narrator, a man named Diti who was trained as a waiter by an imperious man whose boast gives the book its title, himself later serves the Emperor of Ethiopia.

That banquet sequence is vivid to readers, but so are Diti’s moments of passion. We see him in a brothel for his first (and successive) encounters. When Germans take over the sex becomes regimented, but Diti still believes in love. (Even the novel’s darkest pages are larded with sardonic humor.)

From his earliest days as a busboy to his final years in a mountain cabin (with mirrored walls!) Diti‘s life reflects the political upheavals of our century. ( )

A first-person account of working in Czechoslovakia's hotel industry around the war years, which was full of funny anecdotes but ambled and dragged its heels. I had to give up about three quarters of the way through in despair of reaching the end and having had nothing happen. ( )

coming up soon... ( )

I was in Sherborne, thinking about this book, about how I’d been looking at it in Waterstones the week before, weighing it in my palm before deciding to leave it for another day. Ahead was a street market. One of the stalls had a selection of a couple of hundred books. This was one of them; it was fate, I bought it for £2.

This fortuitous discovery, and my wistful romanticizing of Prague and the author (mainly from this photo), may have led to unrealistic expectations. I was really really ready to love this book.

And for the first half, I did. Now, Europe east of Germany acts as this hemisphere’s South America - when novels aren’t magical realist there’s always the feeling that they might go that way. Need I say that the story is against a backdrop of Czech history from the ‘30s through to the communist ‘50s? Do I have to mention that Dittie is a very small man? Comparisons with the Tin Drum are inevitable and obvious - next time someone talks about the Tin Drum say you've read this, and isn't it interesting that European literature responded to the Nazi past through stunted seducers? I don't have anything to add on the issue. I'd leave it hanging - you should too.

The breaking out of war changes the novel. From erotic adventures in brothels we come to marriage with a Nazi. It was refreshing to have a character associating with the Germans, but from here on the novel seems to lose its coherence and become one damn thing after another.

Hrabal was said to write in Hrabalovština, a playful use of Czech and probably untranslatable. He did about enough for me to want to try another of his books: he still has my respect, but for now I’m withholding my love. ( )