Customer Reviews

The Book of Hrabal

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First off, Esterhazy is obviously not Hrabal the Storyteller, nor is he intending to be a Hrabal the Storyteller. In fact, he writes of a frustrated, blocked writer who is miserably *failing* to write a book celebrating Hrabal. It's a cosmic joke on mimicry; a book that ends with a jazz-loving God picking up a saxophone for the first time and letting out a horrific blurt of a note that resounds across the world.

Throughout Esterhazy's characteristically chaotic mono/dia/tria/etc.logues there are lovely, alchemic moments: "you probably know what a Hungarian sentence is like...with not a structure in sight, or a decent relative pronoun, the words all lumped together, and yet...A Hungarian sentence is this `and yet'. You have to start from scratch every time. It's as little civilized as the heart." Here, to generalize, you have a summary description of Esterhazy's own prose.

Another shining verbal moment:

"Masturbation which -- though it may never get you anywhere, nevertheless creates a universal space-time, the genesis of all creation; it is not rhythm, but throbbing!" E. loves to take the bodily(uncouth by Western standards) and mix it in with some dabs of theory. And honestly, reading *The Book of Hrabal* is *throbbing*. Largely due to my accidental run-in with this book I, a woman of no Eastern European descent, am currently learning Hungarian and pursuing graduate studies in Hungarian Literature. That should speak for itself.

This was the second of Esterhazy's books I read- the first being "A little Hungarian Pornography. (KMP)" I approached this book with great interest, not because I liked KMP but because Hrabal is one of my favorite writers. I am unclear how Esterhazy intends this as a homage to him.

Esterhazy's style is curt and doesn't flow. It appears he is trying to do some James Joyce/Jose Saramago thing, but badly- which is pretty much par for the course as his other books are written in the same style.

This is especially ironic, as Bohumil Hrabal is above all a storyteller. Hrabal's style and content are as different from Esterhazy as moon from sun. My greatest concern with the book (which I find merely annoying), and in fact the reason I am writing this review, is that I would find it a great tragedy if anyone steered celar of Hrabal after reading this pathetic attempt to cop some glory off of his name. Scrap this book and get a copy of "I served the King of England" or "Ostre Stredovany Vlaky."