Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Bohumil Hrabal developed a literary technique that he called palavering: gabbing endlessly in a stream of consciousness fashion. Hrabal called palaverers,

people who, thanks to their madness, transcend themselves through experiment and spontaneity, and through their ridiculousness they achieve a kind of grandeur, because they end up where no one expected them or expects them. Quoted from the introduction by [[Adam Thirlwell]]

Hrabal took palavering to the extreme in this short novel which lacks a single period. The narrator of this nonstop monologue is a man nearing seventy who is chatting up some women in a pub/brothel. He is by turns reminiscing, trying to entertain the ladies, and losing himself in the past with a touch of dementia. show more The stories can be laugh out loud funny, nostalgic, folklorish, or all three at the same time. As the novel winds down, so does the narrator, and one senses the beginning of a repetition that will change the narrator from a funny, harmless rake into a sad, senile old man.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story with it's irreverent pokes at Christianity, the monarchy, and sex. The narrator is wildly entertaining and well worth the concentration it takes to follow his rambling, disjointed speech. After finishing, I read the introduction by Adam Thirlwell, which provides a thorough look at palavering in its historical context (Joyce's [Ulysses], Hašek's [Good Soldier Svejk], etc.). I would recommend not reading the introduction first, however, as it quotes extensively from the novel, which detracts from the freshness of the narrative. show less

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, show more 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. show less

I'm always fascinated by experiments that just don't work, and here's one: yes, this novella is one unfinished sentence, supposedly. But Hrabal is too good a writer not to compose units of meeting within that sentence, so really it's a bunch of sentences with commas instead of full stops. That's not much of a criticism, because it's very well written (and/or very well translated).

Otherwise, there's not much to say. It's short, it's heartbreaking, it's hilarious, and, as other reviewers have noted, your enjoyment is entirely reliant on how engaging or interesting your find the monologist. I found him very interesting: so many of his little stories end in death, he's plainly a fool, but he's also very funny. Given the option of reading show more the last chapter of Ulysses, which apparently inspired this rant, and reading this book again, I'll take this every time.

Special bonus points for Adam Thirlwell's excellent introduction. show less

Mother of God, isn't life breathtakingly beautiful.

Joel bought me this book several years ago. It appeared so disjointed that I never truly considered it. Today the world was revealed as damp and overcast; reconciling myself to those conditions, Manchester United lost to City 6-1 and I slumped, to be polite. Reaching out, I heartily stumbled upstairs to scan our shelves and returned with Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, coincidentally just as my wife was browsing reviews of such on this wicked site. That was wonky weird. I read the book in a pair of sittings and while it isn't explosive, it is a meandering monologue for the ages. It reminds me of Moscow To The End of the Line, but Hrabal's novella is better.

I like Bohumil Hrabal's writing very much, but I know that one of his favourite things is to write long run-on sentences; in this case, the sentence lasts for the duration of the book, and while I understand that this is to make it seem like the narrator is breathlessly relating everything he can think to talk about in a single extended breath, there's really no reason not to have included some full stops.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is a bizarre book that I loved. very funny at moments. It is one long sentence long. the author takes jabs at the monarchy and the catholic church among others. Its manner of telling the story, essentially a soliloquy is appealing. It's as if the reader is his therapist and he is telling you his story. Difficult to catch your breath.

I enjoyed the film version of Hrabel's I Served the King of England, so I thought I'd give this little book a try. I could not get through it; I stopped after about 20 pages. The entire book is one long, rambling sentence that jumps from one topic to another, from a woman's retrieving her glass eye from under and theatre seat and popping it back in to baking to nose picking to red pumps. I know that is what the author intended as a kind of stylistic experiment, a post-surreal stream of consciousness, but it didn't work for me. I found it more irritating than amusing.