The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (Paperback)

by Bohumil Hrabal (Author), James Naughton (Translator), Josef Skvorecky (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews
From the popular Czech writer (I Served the King of England, 1989; Too Loud a Solitude, 1990), two more novels filled with wit, life, hyperbole, history--and pathos. Long ago, a young wife named Mary has hair that's long and golden and a young husband, Francin, who's manager of a brewery in a little town where the beer is distributed by two big dray horses named Ede and Kare (who sometimes break away for a wild run, their hooves tossing sparks). Life goes on normally enough for the loving Mary and Francin until Uncle Pepin comes to visit (and stays for life)--after which comedy, cross-purposes, and happy (usually) misdirections become the rule. Uncle Pepin's very elements are life, energy, lust, swagger, and comic mischief, and between him and young Mary, a counterbalance to the more earnest if lovable Francin is formed, at least until new times come around, radio is invented, styles change, and ``Everything is going to have to be shortened''--including Mary's long golden hair, a loss by barbering that turns life upside down, at least for a minute or two. So ends Cutting It Short, succeeded by The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, which opens eight years later, looks backward into history under Austria's rule while coming forward through WW II, and finds Uncle Pepin's spirit pitiably waning as Francin's waxes--and as Communism arrives ``and some other kind of time began.'' Francin's old love of motors and trucks will give him a happy new life as distributor of vegetables and other goods--until an empty militarism brings calamity, followed by the piteous death of the faded Uncle Pepin and, from Hrabal, a concluding elegy for times past and gone that ranks with the most sweetly moving ever--period. Lyric, poetic, political novels so entirely filled with imagination and life--and tears--that they burst wonderfully and gloriously at the seams. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
From the popular Czech writer (I Served the King of England, 1989; Too Loud a Solitude, 1990), two more novels filled with wit, life, hyperbole, history - and pathos. Long ago, a young wife named Mary has hair that's long and golden and a young husband, Francin, who's manager of a brewery in a little town where the beer is distributed by two big dray horses named Ede and Kate (who sometimes break away for a wild run, their hooves tossing sparks). Life goes on normally enough for the loving Mary and Francin until Uncle Pepin comes to visit (and stays for life) - after which comedy, cross-purposes, and happy (usually) misdirections become the rule. Uncle Pepin's very elements are life, energy, lust, swagger, and comic mischief, and between him and young Mary, a counterbalance to the more earnest if lovable Francin is formed, at least until new times come around, radio is invented, styles change, and "Everything is going to have to be shortened" - including Mary's long golden hair, a loss by barbering that turns life upside down, at least for a minute or two. So ends Cutting It Short, succeeded by The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, which opens eight years later, looks backward into history under Austria's rule while coming forward through WW II, and finds Uncle Pepin's spirit pitiably waning as Francin's waxes - and as Communism arrives "and some other kind of time began." Francin's old love of motors and trucks will give him a happy new life as distributor of vegetables and other goods - until an empty militarism brings calamity, followed by the piteous death of the faded Uncle Pepin and, from Hrabal, a concluding elegy for times past and gone that ranks with the most sweetly moving ever - period. Lyric, poetic, political novels so entirely filled with imagination and life - and tears - that they burst wonderfully and gloriously at the seams. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Time Warner Books/Abacus UK (May 27, 1993)
• ISBN-10: 0349103240
• ISBN-13: 978-0349103242
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,707,797 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the little town where time stood still, February 22, 2000

By	Molnár Csaba (Budapest, Hungary) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (F): A Novel (Hardcover)

Helo, I am Hungarian (so Molnár is my family-name). Hungary is in Central Europe too, and we were also a "red" country. Hrabal, I think, is my favorite writer. Hrabal was in his twenties when ww2 ended, and the comunists take the power. His father lost his job, the life of the hole family changed. The harmonic times ended. Hrabal was a young lawyer in these times, but he had to work at the train, couse his father was is a "too high" position in time www2. He fall in a deep depression. This book is the third of his monographic trilogy. But it's not the same. in the first and second (sorry, i don't know their english titles)there is a harmonic life in a little village, but in the third everything fall into parts. I offer, if you haven't ever read any book by hrabal, read first the firts and second part os the trilogy.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The passing of an age, January 18, 2001

By	C. Gilbert "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (F): A Novel (Hardcover)

This book also contains the story "Cutting it Short" and has an introduction by Josef Skvorecky.

An engaging portrait of a small town in Bohemia in the period between world war I and II. "Cutting it Short" tells the story of Maryska, an irrepressible young woman who had the habit as a child of nearly drowning. "The Little Town Where Time Stood Still" focuses on Maryska's son as a young man who shares the same talent for stirring up trouble as his mother. Although it is not a major work, it is very satisfying to read and manages to be both moving and funny at the same time.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Such an Ironic Title!, April 30, 2009

By	Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (Paperback)

If only, if only! time had really stood still in Hrabal's enchanting little town! But in fact just the broken town clock and the author's nostalgia for a more vivid but extinguished Life stood, while modernity in the form of radios and Skodas crept in, followed by the Russian army and the New Era of collectivization. That's the main point of these paired novellas, Cutting It Short & The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. Sadly, only Bohumil Hrabal's bittersweet memories truly stand still.

The narrator of Cutting It Short, Maryska, is "not a decent wife" but a wild woman, untamed and untamable, whose ankle-length sunshine hair is the glory of the town, unfurling like a banner of freedom behind her as she pedals her bicycle recklessly here and there. Her husband Francin can no more manage her than he could drive Apollo's chariot, but he loves her with intense fidelity. Francin above all aspires to be 'decent', to do his job and advance his family's station, but his wife, his brother Pepin, and eventually his son have too much joie de vivre to submit to his respectability. Maryska certainly never "stands still." She's the tidal wave of change, the first village woman to cut her skirt short and show her knees, and her model of style is Josephine Baker...!

It can't have been easy for a guy who looked like Hrabal, distinctly weather-beaten, ugly as a boot, to project the voice of a gorgeous woman narrator, and especially such a hoyden, but he did it. His Maryska is completely convincing.

Maryska's son, an eight-year-old boy, is the narrator when the story resumes in The Little Town. His tale begins with his own willful misadventure of getting a tattoo on his chest without his father's approval. The setting is sometime in the 1930s, though for the boy time does seem amorphously still; the story chiefly concerns the two brothers, Francin and Pepin. Francin is still trying to be decent, while Pepin is an archetypal madman, a carouser, a fabulator, an irrepressible lover of life. The brothers are profoundly loyal to each other, and to Maryska. As their antics unfold, the boy narrator fades more and more into the background, until his 'voice' is essentially that of an observer/author. Meanwhile, World War II rolls through town, but even occupation by the hated Germans can't repress Pepin. In fact, the 'fun' continues until the installation of the New Era of Communism, when everything both brothers represent becomes archaic and irrelevant.

The 'little town' is built around a brewery, of which Francin is the manager. Beer flows freely in amber waves through every anecdote, washing the actors in a drunken exuberance of lust for life. Life! despite any and all constraints. I visited a brewery town in Czechoslovakia - Hradec Kralove - which might have been the model for Hrabal's village. My visit was during that brief splendid interlude between the two deathly '-isms' of Communism and Tourism. My impression of the place fortifies my appreciation of Hrabal's powers of evocation. I had an awfully jolly time there, guzzling glorious beer and gobbling roast duck. The Czechs all thought I was East German and teased me mercilessly about how much more miserable things had been in "my" country than in theirs. I couldn't let them know the truth, that my passport was Swedish, since the Czechs have never forgiven the Swedes for the Thirty Years War.

By the way, hey, Swedes! I have to ask you, how come Hrabal never got the Nobel Prize? Both Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky acclaim him as the greatest Czech writer of his generation, and I agree. Hrabal's writings combine the rollicking humor of Mark Twain or Marcel Pagnol with the historical wisdom of Joseph Roth and the evocative magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Should I throw in Kafka and Kazantzakis? If you can read this book without immediately rushing to buy another Harbal, you're a different kind of reader from me.