Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age [Hardcover]

Bohumil Hrabal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 1995

An old man, a shoemaker who once wore a pince-nez and carried a stick with a silver mounting because he wanted to look like a composer, tells the story of his life to six youn, beautiful women basking in the sun. One drunken thought triggers another. Amorous conquests alternate with sundry mishaps and in the exuberant telling acquire the same weight and substance as earth-shattering events. To say nothing of the historical perspective, which the self-styled "engineer of human feet" bends at random to suit his mood. Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age displays the inimitable Czech master at his playful best.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The unnamed narrator of this comic rant proclaims that any book worth its salt is "meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out." Czech novelist Hrabal (Closely Watched Trains) very nearly fills that peculiar bill in this humorous and breathless affair, which is told in one never-ending sentence?a technique that just may make readers pay him the ultimate compliment by looking around for handy blunt objects. The narrator, a scurrilous old man who claims to have been a shoemaker and a brewer, approaches six sunbathing women and embarks on a rambling monologue about his past loves, the past in general and his "magic hands for what we called contessa shoes." He enjoys telling scandalous tales about his betters, including the one about the old emperor looking up women's skirts. Hrabal, who has been cited as a major literary influence by Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima, among others, is generally considered the most revered living Czech author. It's easy to see why. As this novel (originally published in Czechoslovakia in 1964) plays around with Czech history, juxtaposing the public life of the country with the private life of the narrator, Hrabal displays abounding energy and a rambunctious wit.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hrabal, one of the foremost contemporary Czech writers, has devised a provocative little novel for special readers. In a breathless monologue--in fact, in one unbroken sentence--an old shoemaker spouts off to a captive audience of young women about his life and ideas. From political history ("his son, the crown prince, was forced to marry Princess Stephanie of Belgium, but he was wild for Vetsera's body, she had these gigantic breasts and eyes" ) to morality ("Christ wanted us to love our neighbors, he wanted discipline, not love on the sofa the way some mealy-brained idiots would have it" ), the old man perambulates over a wide range of territory, spreading recollections and opinions far and wide. For readers who appreciate language for its own sake, this short book is fertile ground; for those who need a firm plot as anchorage, they had best turn elsewhere. For active foreign-literature collections. Brad Hooper

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (September 11, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151238103
• ISBN-13: 978-0151238101
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,080,333 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most charming books on earth, January 12, 2000

By 

Kai Weber (München) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (Hardcover)

Imagine you are a young girl and an old man is standing on a ladder by a tree and picking cherries. He starts telling you events from his and his ancestors lives, and he won't stop for the next 2 or 3 hours. (This is the time you will need to read that book.) It is incredible how he switches from one topic to the next in an unpredictable way, but nevertheless this book is a single speech. It is written in ONE sentence. OK, Hrabal uses question and exclamation marks from time to time, but these do not really end a sentence, no, it goes on and on... Hrabal shows, that he has learned from James Joyce, this book is very much influenced by Joyces' streams of consciousness, but it is much more easy to read because of the bizarre humour of this old man on the tree. Read this book, and teach your mind how to dance...

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Randy Old Coot!, July 13, 2010

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (Hardcover)

Jirka the shoemaker, I mean, who's the narrator of this pocket-sized little book of just 117 pages, though judging by his photo Bohumil Hrabal was a raunchy old coot himself by the time he wrote "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" in 1964, long before he fell or jumped from a fifth-floor window but he'd always had a reputation as a bohemian and womanizer first-class which made him fascinating for his fellow Czechs, but I doubt he was ever as platitudinous or boastful of his exploits or prone to maunder about the 'good old days' of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as Jirka, no, Hrabal was too artful a writer to pawn that garrulous old fart off on the reader as a representation of himself except as maybe sardonic self-parody, with Jirka leaning on the fence around the village churchyard and gabbling about the past to the six beautiful young sun-bathers on the grass, telling them slyly what a ladies' man he'd been in his time along with wry gossip about the follies of people long dead including the composer Strauss and the last Habsburg Emperor himself, all his reminiscences intertangled like snagged fishing line but once in a while a remark about post-war conditions will squirt out of his senile babble like a squirt of lemon juice in the reader's eye, so you better find yourself a chair and a length of time sufficient to read this quirky tour de force all in one sitting because it's all one long run-on sentence and there's no place to take a potty break or even catch a breath, but if you wonder what's it's all about, other than a facsimile of an old coot's rambling, you can take a look at page 46 where Jirka has just been spinning anecdotes about goofy suicides he's witnessed, and suddenly he exclaims "Mother of God, isn't life breathtakingly beautiful!"

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The old man at the bar, May 3, 2011

By 

P. J. Owen (Atlanta GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Bohumil Hrabal, who is probably the best-known and most important Czech writer of the second-half of the twentieth century after Milan Kundera, began writing professionally late in life. His first collection of poetry wasn't published until after World War II, when he was 34. The communist regime then forced him into an underground writing group, in which he wrote but didn't publish. It wasn't until the early sixties, then almost fifty, that he became a writer by profession. It was around this time, in 1964, that he published Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. It is perhaps because the author was himself advanced in age when he wrote it that this book seems more reminiscence than novel.

Hrabal often wrote in long sentences, but DLFTAIA pushes this style to the limit: it is one 117-page sentence. Of course, it isn't really one long sentence. It's stream of consciousness punctuated with commas where periods should rightly go. I considered this to be a gimmick at first, but the style seems a good artistic choice given the novel is nothing more than one long monologue of an old man, telling stories to a group of women. (And us.) But he doesn't just tell us stories. He unleashes a cascade of anecdotes, jokes, and maxims.

We learn that the narrator has remained a lifelong bachelor, and was at various times a soldier, a shoemaker, and a brewer. He brags of his many sexual conquests, the majority of which were initiated by women (he would seem to have been a looker in his day). So though he does ramble, we're amused because it's obvious he's led an interesting life and done lots of things. He's a good and vivid storyteller, though he won't stick with one particular story very long and like many older folks, is easily distracted. He tells us about an acquaintance,

"...a hatter from Prostejov (who) once told me he took a woman with a glass eye to the pictures and she sneezed and it flew out and during the break they had to go crawling under the seats for it, but she found it and wiped it off, pulled up her eyelid, and pop! in it went.."

before moving on to a friend named Kocourek, who,

"had a bandaged finger, and one day he was stuffing liverwursts and the bandage disappeared into one of them, and because chances were an enlisted man would get the one with the bandage he forgot about it, but guess what young ladies, it was the doctor! (the one who bandaged him) ...he was on his third liverwurst, and the minute he cut into it he recognized his handiwork and puked and Kocourek was sent to the front..."

And so on.

He sometimes pleasantly surprises us by throwing in profound bits, such as,

"marriage is like dragging a cow hide along a sheet of thin ice"

and

"Socrates and Christ they never wrote a line yet their teachings are still valid, while others are less read the more books they publish".

Like anyone who has really lived life, simple reflections can sometimes carry the knowledge of centuries, and we recognize his and our own inward smiles as he unleashes this wisdom.

But reading this book is a bit like sitting at a bar with any old man who's rambling on about his life; and like anyone rambling on about their lives, he goes on too long. It's getting late and our eyes are starting to glaze over. We try to suppress a yawn. We sense there's some underlying order to his stories, some pattern to it all, but we can't figure it out and begin not to care. Then he gets a little crude, telling us about a friend who pisses on people. Then he get real dark as he relates the scene of a policeman catching a woman in the act of sawing meat off her own dead and hanging daughter. Still, we feel bad because he is an old man after all. He probably doesn't have anyone to talk to anymore. We realize how important this time to reflect is for him, how proud he is to share his life experiences and knowledge. But we can't help it. We have to interrupt him to excuse ourselves. DLFTAIA ends without punctuation-- no periods pollute this work, perhaps as a sign the old man will go on without us.

Hrabal is a great writer and he writes of weighty matters, even when he's being funny. This juxtaposition of light and dark is in fact a strength of his. As are his his vivid renderings of these experiences. But like the listener at the bar, I could only take so much. I enjoyed it for awhile, but tired out long before he did. I feel bad about not loving this book since he is such a great writer, but I just can't. I can appreciate it, but it remains at arm's length. It entertained for part of an evening, but it won't be long before the experience will be gone from my mind completely. Except perhaps for stray images of eyeballs rolling along the floor of a darkened theater, or a mother hacking her daughter to pieces.