Customer Reviews

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

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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...

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!"

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.

Hrabal writes with such passion, wit, humour and compassion that it is hard to imagine anyone not enjoying this book

It is hard to drop this book for a break because the whole book is in one sentence. It is fun reading through the randomness of stories and thoughts in this book.
This book most mimics Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk. The humor is in this book at times makes you laugh out loud and sometimes just a chuckle but throughout the content is engaging and hilarious.
I would recommend this book to anyone up for a couple of hours of fun reading and who wants fun ideas for their Twitter tweets.

This was a brief and unique book. I picked it up after reading I Served the King of England, and though I would not necessarily recommend this book, I thought its style was commendable. There were approximately 100 pages in this book, all rambling chatter without any stopping points or punctuation. If you can tolerate such a thing, go ahead and read it. Otherwise, well, pass it up.

A novel of one sentence, even a 20,000-word one? Although I can occasionally detect the sensibility that produced the masterpieces _I Served the King of England_ and _Closely Watched Trains_, I found this boring and a major rip-off. Perhaps if there had been some introduction I would feel less hostile.

Along with _Too Long a Solitude_ it shows that even a book too short to be a book can seem interminable.