Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997)

Grabbed this from the library the day after watching the classic film version directed by Jiří Menzel. This is a superb novella. Comical and ghastly scenes in and around an unimportant railway halt in the final chaotic days of WWII. The narrator’s anxiety over his sexual awakening parallels the turbulence of the ongoing German retreat amid partisan countermeasures. The morally constipated stationmaster breeds (Polish, not German) pigeons; his wife fattens geese and gives off babushka vibes. Dispatcher Hubička is bald, plain, and a magnet for the ladies, famously applying the station’s range of stamps to the behind of the telegraph girl. Under it all is a collective profound, merciless hatred for the German occupiers and their barbarous ways, and a wish for them to be gone. The ending differs from the film version and is far better, I think.… (more)

A book that begs to be read in one sitting, a drunken monologue rendered by Hrabal in a fantastically erudite and maddening run-on sentence (to which this paltry review pays homage) while the aged, weathered, but oh-so-wise Jirka addresses an unspecified group of "young ladies" on subjects ranging from the role of the Czech monarchy in its heyday, the pursuit of love and sex through Jirka's inebriated and senile recollections ("it's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls"), the proper fermentation processes for making different kinds of beer, the strange, tragicomic suicides and deaths that make up the history of his community, the influence of what he calls "the European Renaissance," beekeeping, poetics, Strauss, sexual anatomy and urine and far too many pissing contests, and the meaning of dreams being rather like life itself—the exact opposite and often a puzzling inverse of what one sees and comprehends at first glance.… (more)