The Little Town Where Time Stood Still by Bohumil Hrabal

Now Francin had me the way he wanted me to be, a nice decent woman sitting at home, he knew where this woman was, and where she would be tomorrow, somewhere he would like to make her stay for always, not too ill, but sort of ailing, a woman who would hobble to the stove, to the chair, to the table, but above all a woman who would be some kind of burden, because for Francin it was the height of matrimonial bliss when I was grateful to him for making me my breakfast in the morning, and going on the motorbike at midday to fetch lunch from the restaurant, but above all it meant he could show me how much he loved me, with what joy he was prepared to care for me, and somehow, just as he took care of me, so ought I to be taking care of him, that was Francin's dream, that every year I might catch angina and flu, and occasionally get pneumonia. That always made him blissfully happy, nobody else knew how to look after a person like Francin did, that was his religion, his heaven on earth, when he could wrap me in sheets dampened in cold water, when he ran around me with the sheet and wound it on to me as if he were embalming me alive, but then he took me in his arms and laid me carefully in my bed, like little girls do with their dolls.

Francin is the manager of a brewery in a small unnamed town in Czechoslovakia. A decent, practical man, he takes his job seriously and is a conscientious worker. These qualities are challenged by his wife, who is beautiful but inclined to indulge every impulse, and his brother, "Uncle Pepin," a vivacious man who, something like the brother who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt in Arsenic and Old Lace, imagines that he's still an active member of his Austrian military corps. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is split into two halves with different narrators who tell the story of Francin and his family: first, "Cutting It Short," narrated by his wife, and then the title novella, which is narrated by the couples' young son. (Strangely, the son disappears almost immediately after telling an anecdote about how, to his father's frustration, he gets a tattoo of a naked, bearded mermaid, though he'd wanted one of a ship. The only evidence that the novella is narrated by the child after this is that Francin is referred to as "Dad.")

Both novellas bear Hrabal's trademark comic realism, one step to the left of the social realism that Soviet authorities, whose censorship Hrabal fell afoul of more than once, were trying to promote. In "Cutting It Short," Francin's wife Maryska becomes wrapped up in the trendiness of shortening everything, starting with women's skirts. She clips the horse's mane, and then the dog's tail--much to the dog's chagrin. So it's not exactly true that the town where they live is "the little town where time stood still," as the second novella asserts, but the forces of change which are played for comedy in the first novella become much more sinister in the second. First, it's the Nazis who come to occupy the brewery, and then the Soviets, who take the brewery out of the hands of owners and managers and give it to the workers. Francin loses his job this way; though the workers admit he was always decent to them, this makes him only worse, because a decent manager only entrenches the power of the bourgeoisie. So Francin takes to mushroom hunting with Uncle Pepin, becoming, in his way, as aloof and isolated as his brother. "The Little Town Where Time Stood Still" is an elegy for old ways ripped up, root and branch, by Soviet control of Czechoslovakia; one of the most affecting images comes late in the novel when Francin stops by the cemetery to see the graves and monuments being demolished and carted away.

I wasn't as taken with The Little Town Where Time Stood Still as I was with I Served the King of England, a comic masterpiece, or the absurdist novella Too Loud a Solitude. All three are stories about working people, though their relationships to the proletariat are never straightforward: a waiter, a book incinerator, a brewery manager. I never connected will with the character of Uncle Pepin, who felt funnier in theory than in practice. Part of that might be that the translator has Pepin speaking in a bewildering Scots dialect, which must be a way of transliterating whatever rural dialect of Czech he speaks, but it's just more confusing than anything. But I did like the way the comic elements of the book revolved around the stolid Francin, whose stalwart nature is challenged by a rapidly changing world.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've come to look like my encyclopedias--and a good three tons of them I've compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

The narrator of Bohumil Hrabal's slim meditative novel Too Loud a Solitude has been working for thirty-five years us, as he tells us at the beginning of each chapter, in wastepaper. His job is to take old books and documents deposited through a hole in the ceiling of his cellar shop and crush them into bales for disposal. When he finds an old book, he reads through it first, perhaps taking it home, or perhaps placing it at the heart of a certain bale like a seed of precious unattended knowledge. Though he is a laborer, he's become infused with all the things he has read: Schopenhauer, the Talmud, Erasmus, Nietzsche. These things are not just contained within him, but are him--he is a "jug filled with water both magic and plain," in that lovely image.

Too Loud a Solitude is only 100 pages long, but it has the same kind of picaresque and unconnected quality as Hrabal's novel I Served the King of England. The episodes, remembered or immediate, have a precious and absurdist quality: there's the professor who digs through the wastepaper who thinks the wastepaper man, Hanta, is a different person when he sees him in the square from when he sees them in the cellar; the great bale-crusher Hanta contemplates in fear, John Henry like, that it will replace him. One of my favorite of Hanta's memory is about an old girlfriend who just, for some reason, can not stop accidentally appearing in public with errant poop on her ribbons or her shoes. A sweeter version of that story is about a beautiful Gypsy girl who appears on Hanta's doorstep and moves in without speaking, and who is eventually taken away and destroyed by Nazis.

In I Served the King of England, Nazism is a surprise; it happens to the narrator suddenly and perplexingly as perhaps it happened to Europe. Here, it's little more than subtext, but it frames Hanta's character in an intriguing way, I think. Is the destruction of Hanta's beloved works in the wastepaper baler meant to parallel the Nazi predilection for book burning? Is Hanta perhaps an image of the intellectual human spirit in which ideas thrive, even when books are destroyed? There is something, too, in the obvious contrast between Hanta's working class identity and his absorption of these great works, a collapse of our expectations about the working and intellectual classes. Hanta dreams that Jesus and Lao-Tzu are haunting his cellar; they become figures of the progressus ad futurum and the regressus ad originem, the march to the future and the return to the past. How do these competing conceptions of time and futurity capture the schizophrenia of Europe in the 20th century? I think there's a lot lurking beneath the surface here.

Too Loud a Solitude is one of those books that dismisses expectations about genre: is it realist or absurdist? Comedy or tragedy? A novel or a story? I always admire the confidence in books like this, that don't want to be anything than what they are. The worst thing you can say about Too Loud a Solitude, I think, is that it's over too soon.

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

Here, in the Hotel Tichota, I also learned that the ones who invented the notion that work is ennobling were the same ones who drank and ate all night long with beautiful women on their knees, the rich ones, who could be as happy as little children.  I always used to think that the rich were damned, that country cottages and cozy little parlors and sour soup and potatoes were what gave people a feeling of happiness and well-being, and that wealth was evil.  Now it seemed that all that stuff about happiness in poor country cottages was invented by these guests of ours, who didn't care how much they spent in a night, who threw money to the four winds and felt good doing it.

Ditie is a waiter in one of the finest hotels in Prague.  The headwaiter tells him that the job of a waiter is to see everything and to see nothing--that is, to hone his powers of observation so that he might know each customer and serve them perfectly, but to be discreet about what he sees.  From his vantage point Ditie sees everything, coming to understand the wealth and power of sausage salesman, witnessing the childish love affair of the president of Czechoslovakia himself, but his keen eye is balanced by a boyish innocence and naivete.  Another waiter, who can anticipate everything a customer will order, always says his perspicacity comes from the fact that he once served the King of England.  And so Ditie, once decorated for his exceptional service to the visiting Haile Selassie, is able to say in moments of great vision, it is because I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.

I Served the King of England is a funny book, characterized by a lighthearted skewering of the wealthy as it follows Ditie from one hotel to another.  Its satirical tone is a step removed from reality, closer to something like a Wes Anderson movie than real life (and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Anderson was thinking of this novel when he made The Grand Budapest Hotel).  But at the novel's midpoint, Ditie falls in love with a gym instructor who has accompanied invading Nazi forces, and the novel transforms from the picaresque into something more tragic and fraught.  Ditie is incensed by the way his hotelier superiors snub his fiancee, Lise, simply because she's German.  But at the same time, when he's prodded by Nazi doctors assessing whether he's "worthy of inseminating an Aryan vagina with dignity," he can't deliver a semen sample because he's too shaken by the image of his countrymen being executed by the Nazis.

Hrabal's version of occupied Czechoslovakia is a bloody farce.  His Nazis are obsessed with physical fitness; Ditie finds work at a ridiculous hotel designed to serve pregnant Teutonic women in preparation of the future master race.  He does something similar with the post-war Soviet occupation: Ditie emerges from the war as a hotel owner and a millionaire, but he's quickly thrown in prison for it.  He's delighted; in fact, Hrabal includes a funny scene where Ditie practically begs to be arrested simply so that the world will recognize his achievement and stature as a millionaire.  The prison itself is an extended joke, a kind of vacation resort where the millionaires rule the guards and the locked gate is unconnected to any wall.

I Served the King of England does a great job satirizing the place of Czechoslovakia in twentieth century history, but its most affecting scenes are smaller and more personal.  Ditie, disillusioned by the lack of satisfaction becoming a hotel owner and a millionaire have afforded him, takes a position mending roads in a remote mountain town.  Alone with a set of animals--a horse, a dog, a goat, and a cat--he is at last satisfied.  The townspeople find him after a snow storm in his old waiter's tuxedo and sash:

I invited them into the inn, and when they looked at me, I saw they were alarmed.  Where did you get that?  Who gave it to you?  How come you're dressed up like that?  And I said, Sit down, gentleman, now that you're my guests.  I used to be a waiter.  As though regretting they had come, they asked, What's that sash and that medal all about?  I said, I was given them many years ago, because I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.  And who are you serving now? they asked, still uneasy.  My guests, as you can see, I answered, and pointed to the horse and the goat, who had stood up and wanted out, butting their head against the door.  I opened it for them, and they filed out and walked down their corridor to the stable.  But my tuxedo and the sparkling medal and the blue sash upset the villagers so much that they just stood there.

I love this final image of Ditie, no longer dreaming about his future renown as a hotel owner, but resuming the life of service and humility, not for the powerful and the wealthy, but for a horse and a goat.  It's silly but also poignant, which is a great way of describing the power of I Served the King of England.