Customer Reviews

I Served the King of England

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Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England is a beautiful, sparse, simply told story about a little man named Ditie. Ditie is a little man in the sense that he is small in stature. He is also little in the sense that he is merely a waiter, a little man who wanders blithely through the critical historical events that buffeted Czechoslovakia between 1935 and 1950 or so.

As the novel opens Ditie is a busboy at the Golden Prague Hotel. On his first day the hotel manager pulls him by the left ear to advise him to "remember, you don't see anything and you don't hear anything." The manager then pulls him by the right ear and tells him that he has "to see everything and hear everything." Ditie manages to learn how to accomplish this seemingly irreconcilable task.

Ditie is an ambitious man whose ambitions focus on acquiring two things: money and 'sensuous' experiences. His life is otherwise void of conscious thought or awareness. In many respects Hrabal portrays him vividly as something less than a complete human being. He earns money on the side selling frankfurters at the local train station. He gains extra tips from passengers ordering frankfurters from the train by fumbling for change long enough for the train to pull out. He decides to become a millionaire after walking into a room to see a portly Czech salesman rolling around on a floor covered with money. Ditie's hunger for sensual experiences is fueled after his first visit to the local brothel, the aptly named Paradise. After his first visit Ditie vows to make so much money that he can continue to explore the delights found there. Hrabal's description of Ditie's introduction to the lure of money and flesh is both comic and delightful.

Ditie leaves the Golden Prague Hotel and makes his way to the Hotel Tichota and then the Hotel Paris where he is promoted to waiter. It is there that he is taken under the wing of the headwaiter Mr. Skrivanek, who knows everything there is to know about being a top waiter. Whenever Ditie asks Skrivanek how he knows a particular fact Skrivanek replies - "because I served the King of England" at a banquet many years ago. Ditie later reaches one of his life's highpoints when he gets to serve the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. He then gets to answer "I served the Emperor of Ethiopia" whenever a younger waiter asks him for advice. The description of the banquet is another wonderful example of Hrabal's story telling ability.

It is while at the Hotel Paris that Ditie meets and falls in love with a young Sudeten German named Lise. As noted, Ditie is unaware or unfazed by the political events that are in the front of everyone else's mind. He is shocked that his fellow waiters ostracize him because of his relationship with Lise merely because of the troubles in the Sudetenland and the pending German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ditie merely wants to become a millionaire and make love to Lise. Ditie is fired shortly before the German invasion.

The story takes us through Ditie's life during the war and up through the Communist accession to power in Czechoslovakia. At every step of the way these events swirl around Ditie without seeming to touch him in any real way. He spends a six month term in jail after the war for his collaboration with the Germans but that does not interfere with his plans to open up a spectacular hotel and become a millionaire. Ditie accomplishes this goal just around the time of the Communist accession to power in Czechoslovakia. Again, this does not seem to have any real impact on Ditie at all. In fact, when it is announced that the new regime will impose a horrendous tax on all millionaires Ditie eagerly awaits the validation that paying this tax will accord him. Instead he is horrified when an old colleague, a member of the Czech resistance who later becomes a party leader, whose life Ditie inadvertently saved from the Gestapo manages to obtain a tax exemption for Ditie. Horrified, Ditie marches to the local police with his bankbook to prove he is a millionaire. Of course all his assets are taken and he is sent to a work camp in the mountains.

It is only after Ditie has lost everything that he achieves some sense of his own humanity. It is a redemption that Ditie probably never knew he needed. As the story ends, Ditie wants nothing more than to be buried on the very top of a particular hill so that part of his remains make their way into some streams in Bohemia and the other part make their way into the Danube.

Although it is certainly easy to set out the events in I Served the King of England it is hard to convey the beauty and the comedy of Hrabal's writing. Hrabal's writing style is something of an anecdotal, stream of consciousness storytelling. It reminds me of the times I would sit in a bar, pub, or caf? in some far away place and come across someone who simply knew how to tell great stories. They might be a tad drunk, they might have told those stories to anyone willing to buy them a pint or too. But they are fun to listen to and sometimes they tell you a little bit about the storyteller and a little about yourself. Hrabal's I Served the King of England is one of those stories.

It is a delightful book.

I don't like words like 'masterpiece,' but there are books that I consider essential reading, books that allow you to connect to and unscramble the meaning of our troubled century. Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England is one of those books and, in my humble opinion, it must be one of the great comic novels of the 20th century, along with The Good Soldier Schweik, The Tin Drum, The Master and Margarita and The Autumm of the Patriarch. It is like those comic novels, about the role of individuals in history, and like those novels, it sheds light on the meaning of life. Unlike those novels however, I Served the King of England has an almost minimalist plot, propelled by the ambition of the main character to become a millionaire. Hrabal does not uses modernist narrative techniques at all; instead his novel develops in a linear fashion as his main character moves from hotel to hotel as a waiter, furthering his ambition and learning from his bosses the art of running a hotel. In the process, the character even joins the nazis (and marries one), becomes a millionaire after the war and looses everything under communist rule. His adventures as a waiter in the hotels are told through a comic, highly visual style that reminded me of Chaplin's films, a feeling later confirmed by Hrabal himself when he compares the adventures of incarcerated millionaires during communism as the height of chaplinesque humor. Somewhere during the middle of the novel I became a little exasperated by the apparent lack of sophistication in the narrative, but the novel only 'appears' to be superficial. There is a big emotional and intellectual pay-off at the end, as the main character comes to terms with history and the value of his connection to humanity. As a reader, I felt privileged to have taken the journey this bawdy and wonderful novel put me through.

Sitting in a café in Prague with several Australians (who happened to be a part of a miserable bus tour of Europe I subjected myself to) and our Czech tour guide, who, out of the kindness of our heart, led us to an off-the-beaten path place where tourists were not as prevalent as in the rest of Prague, we discussed Czech literature, where he (I believe his name was Kaspar) definitively announced that Czech president Vaclav Havel is a miserably bad writer, Milan Kundera is brilliant but overrated nevertheless, and Americans are the most annoying people in the world because we call virtually complete strangers "friends" having only spoken with them for a matter of ten minutes, maybe about something as inane as weather. I asked him, "What is good to read then?" Which is when he told us about Bohumil Hrabal, and the most brilliant book he (Kaspar) had ever read, I Served the King of England. He tried to describe it, but found it impossible because it was too filled with highly nuanced and some very uniquely Czech things. He recommended it, although he qualified his recommendations with many disclaimers: I won't really understand its meaning and depth because I am American. No one but a Czech can understand the significance of this work. Also, while he was at it, he had to let me know that it is impossible as a foreigner to try to learn the Czech language because it is impossible. Expats try it all the time, he assured me, but it is impossible. No, Kaspar impatiently but proudly insists, it does not matter if you have a background in Slavic languages, Czech is unique and only Czechs will truly master it.

Be that as it may, I found a copy of I Served... in a bookshop in Iceland after the bus tour was over. There were not any English language copies to be found in Prague (then again, I only had a few days to check, and I was too busy having a whirlwind two-day affair with a man from Spain who spoke nary a word of English). Be sure, of course, that I would not be so presumptuous as to purchase a copy of this magnificent treasure of modern Czech literature in its native language because it is a language which would naturally only confound me. I am American, after all. I barely know English!

With this glowing recommendation and pile of books I procured for late night reading on a friend's floor (my makeshift bed) in Reykjavik, I read I Served the King of England in one night, and I loved it. It was, as Kaspar promised, a brilliant book. I loved the irreverent and direct style of Hrabal's writing. I suspect that you will too. It is not a book filled with intricacies nor plots and subplots and it is not clogged with millions of characters. It is a simple book, but in its simplicity transcends the need for a lot of extra "stuff". (There is that expected American eloquence again!) I can say that at the end of the book, the narrator is almost like a hermit, living with his dog. If I am not mistaken (it has been almost 2 years since I read the book) the dog actually goes out and gets supplies for the narrator. Eventually the townspeople miss the narrator so much that they go to extraordinary lengths to make him come out of hiding, even (sadly!) killing the narrator's beloved and necessary dog. Definitely read this book if you can find it.

The story of the young apprentice, then waiter going from hotel to hotel, then owner of his own hotel and millionaire, then losing everything, explores with the typical Hrabal's humour, full of tenderness, the physical and psychological development of the boy, his memories through the first Republic of Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then through the occupation of Bohemia by the Third Reich and the II World War until the final Communist take over. The lad, who at the beginning is a sort of parvenu, lusting for money and social recognition, suffers a progressive transformation of his soul which leads him to complete maturity, as he finally understands that wisdom lies in the heart of the humble, and that everything else is meaningless.

First published and distributed secretly during the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, this tragicomic novel by Bohumil Hrabal is a first-person account by Ditie, a teenage busboy at a rural hotel who progresses to waiter, and eventually to successful hotel owner before his fall when the communists take over. The picaresque plot serves as the framework for a series of often hilarious stories about the people Ditie works with, the lives they have led, the values they maintain, their hopes for the future, and the sometimes large chasm between their dreams and reality.

Set in rural hotels, in German camps during their occupation of Czechoslovakia, and in Prague, where Ditie served, not the King of England, but Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the novel concludes at the "end of the road," where Ditie resides with his horse, goat, and cat, living on his memories and writing his autobiography--this book.

Ditie is a charming story-teller, using the casual, almost innocent language of a young boy at the beginning and becoming philosophical and contemplative by the end. Hrabal's sensitivity to small details and his accurate depiction of real people responding to real situations in sometimes odd and often darkly humorous ways make this sometimes satiric novel a delight to read. Ribald and rowdy in his descriptions of his own sexual awakening and in the stories of his customers' peccadillos, Ditie maintains his dignity when he describes the important people with whom he comes into contact--the headwaiter who "served the King of England," the President of Czechoslovakia, and eventually Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, for whom Ditie is personal waiter.

The novel takes a new, darker turn, when Ditie marries a German woman and leaves Prague to live in the mountains--at a breeding station the Germans have established to develop a "refined race of humans." Lise, his wife, travels widely for the Reich, once returning from Warsaw with a suitcase full of valuable stamps, confiscated from Jews, which guarantee their financial future. Their lives are less secure, however, and Ditie eventually dissociates himself from the Germans and tries to re-establish a life of his own, this time as the owner of a Czech hotel built with the proceeds from the sale of the stamps.

By turns hilarious and poignant, satiric and sensitive, the novel depicts many aspects of Czech society and culture, but it is, above all, the story of Ditie, in many ways a Czech everyman. With symbolism throughout, and a repeating character, Zdenek, the headwaiter who "served the King of England," who appears at every crossroads in Ditie's life, the novel is more than a comic romp. A record of a time, place, and culture, it is also Ditie's meditation on his life and his role, if any, in the wider world. Soon to be released as a major film by Academy Award-winning Czech director Jiri Menzel, who also directed the film version of Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains, this novel deserves to find a wide, long-overdue audience. n Mary Whipple

This is a fantastic novel - both literally and in the colloquial sense of that word when it is used as a hyperbolic form of praise; in this instance the praise is merited. Originally published in Czech in 1971, I Served the King of England certainly qualifies Hrabal to be considered as eminent a practitioner of "magic realism" as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or, for that matter, the Gunter Grass of The Tin Drum. If this places the author in elevated literary company, he has earned his place there.

The story begins as a picaresque autobiography of the narrator, the runt "Ditie" who recounts his adventures as a busboy and waiter in Prague and elsewhere. Amazing and awe-inspiring things happen throughout the young man's career, often involving unlikely candidates (waiters, hotel owners, traveling salesmen) for the performance of outrageous or admirable deeds. Ditie is always game for adventures, especially of an erotic nature, and his lavish descriptions of the anatomy and enthusiastic love-making of his favorite prostitutes and other girlfriends is sensually arousing while touching and humorous at the same time (an erection with a heart of gold, wreathed in flowers. as it were.) The story takes a grimmer turn when he falls in love with Lise, a Bohemian German gym-instructor who is even more diminutive than he is. He becomes her knight-errant in a situation of deteriorating relationships between Czechs and Germans as the war approaches, and in his haste to defend his lady-love's honor he turns away from his countrymen in their time of need and oppression, a decision which eventually comes to haunt and discomfit him. This leads to their marriage and his subsequent odd career as a despised waiter at a Nazi "Lebensborn" resort for young women programmatically impregnated by warrior-studs. To the music of Wagner and under the banner of duty to produce a specimen of the Teutonic New Man, he and his wife conceive a stunted, retarded child. At the war's end his wife wends her way heavenward (hellward? Or perhaps just into the ground) courtesy of an Allied bomb, and Ditie has the chance to return to his beloved venue of hotel-and-restaurant in Prague. He is not received warmly by his old colleagues, but manages to create a unique hotel in an abandoned foundry on the grounds of a quarry, using as his capital a fortune Lise looted from Polish Jews during her war service. With his stained wealth and an uneasy conscience he creates a sort of dreamy hotelier's paradise, which is soon doomed to destruction by the new political regime. There is a hilarious interlude at a newly established Communist Party "prison/reform camp" for millionaires, where the prisoners and their guards (all former miners who miss their old job) become interchangeable and totally confused about what is expected from whom - it's a wonderful parody of Lenin's who-whom rhetorical question. Throughout these adventures Ditie has been driven by the desire to become a very rich man, because as a youth he thought that rich men lived the most admirable and rewarding lives; he also desires the admiration of other rich men, especially those from the ranks of the hotel owners. After he realizes this dream he watches it go sour and be crushed. When he is released from the millionaires' prison, things take a final turn for the worse for Ditie, but only in the most superficial sense, because in his new life as an almost totally isolated rural road repairman (he has four animal companions) he discovers a kind of pantheistic tranquility and an impulse to recreate and reconsider his life by writing it all down -- the "arc" of his story is now "from-rags-to-riches-to-rags-again", with the final rags being the frowsy but durable mantle of a self-made philosopher.

The way the story is told - the characterizations and especially the language of Ditie the narrator - is as important as the tall tales themselves. This raises a tricky point. The irascible but occasionally brilliant F. Nietzsche once made the observation that "it is neither the best nor the worst" of a language which is untranslatable, implying that there is a vast range of thought and expression in the "middle" of this spectrum in which deeper meanings and emotional overtones depend upon the unique subtleties of each language and are therefore beyond translation. In a brief after-note the translator, Paul Wilson, writes, "Bohumil Hrabal's work, Czechs say, is untranslatable. This book is my response to that challenge." I don't know how truly bilingual readers evaluate his effort, but for English-language readers I can say that Wilson's translation is much more than serviceable -- it is direct, colloquial, jaunty, funny, and poetic and reflective when it needs to be. It creates a vibrant voice which the reader who does not speak Czech hopes is an authentic mirror of the original. It is definitely a voice you want to listen to, compelling and amusing. Mr. Wilson should be praised for this.

While I feel the above review does the book some justice, I also know that it is impossible to capture its animation and warmth in a brief sketch. How do I know that? Because I have read the work of the man who wrote about Ditie, the Man Who Served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and who himself was instructed by Skrivanek, the Man Who Served the King of England, and, once they -- we -- have been chosen for such estimable parts and acquitted themselves well, people like that just know certain things, don't they?

I Served the King of England is a delightful book that follows a man from the lower classes to wild success to enlightenment. Don't mistake the 'enlightenment' for a Siddharthaesque plot. This book is not written in the detached style that Siddhartha is. Hrabal's writing is warm, sensitive, and alluring - as is the book's main character. From the Paradise brothel to an old hut in the woods, the main character's search for contentment is sincere. And that may be what makes the book so believeable.

Simply one of the most brilliant books I've ever read. An ingenious blend of the everyday and the slightly surreal. A narrator who is completely unique and utterly engaging. A book that unwinds and meanders in a carefree way, where the threads go in all directions but still stay relevant to the main story. It reminded me of Hesse's "Siddhartha"... but that is all I will say in terms of plot.

Ignore any pea-brained reviewer who dismisses this book because the protagonist is "selfish" etc. They are clearly not at the appropriate reading level for a work so sublime. So good it made me cry, literally, in one or two parts.

Absolutely brilliant.

Ditie is the modest protagonist of this quirky, anecdotal fable set amid the backdrop of 20th century Czech history.

Hrabal's writing is detailed, and has a rolling, dreamlike rhythm that is fiercely engaging, and the novel holds up to repeat readings very well.

I was pleasantly reminded of certain Fellini films - Hrabal similarly blends fantasy and the wooziness of memory with stark and sometimes nasty historical events.

Recommended.

-David Alston

Generally speaking, I don't enjoy novels translated into English as much of the eloquence and humor is lost in translation. However, I really liked this book by Bohumil Hrabal (translated by Paul Wilson). Although the book is based on the rise and fall of a fictional person, the historical background is real enough. We trace the personal history of a young man named Dite (which means child in Czech). The story begins during Czechoslovakia's first republic, the nation's golden age. Dite is working as a lowly busboy, but he has dreams and is ambitious. We are with him when he loses his virginity at the local bordello and meets his first love. Dite, always on the lookout to improve his wealth and status, takes a new job at a very prestigious elite hotel, where he meets a whole host of fascinating characters.

Unfortunately, he loses his job, but lands a new one at the swank Paris Hotel in Prague (still exists by the way). He falls in love with a Czech citizen of German ethnicity - unfortunately in 1938 when the Germans had seized the Sudetenland and some Czechs had become extremely hostile toward all ethnic Germans. (Czechs have a long history of being occupied/exploited and are consequently xenophobic.) His girlfriend Lise is attacked by an angry Czech group, and Dite seeths with anger. The tables are turned, however, when the German army occupies Prague later that year, and Dite and Lise are being served by now subservient Czechs. Dite, despite being Czech, is nominally accepted into the ethnic-German community.

His life begins taking a surrealistic turn when he lives in a Nazi-designated breeding town, Decin. Though once passionately in love with Lise, they are drawn apart as the pressures of war and Nazi ideology separate them. Typically, despite this, they have a little boy, which Dite later discovers to be somewhat retarded. When the war comes crashing through Bohemia, Dite's life with Lise lies in ruins, and he is jailed first by the Nazis and then by the Czechs. After many months in prison, he is released and is determined to start a new life.

Dite takes all the substantial savings he has accumulated over the years and invests it in a rather fantastic idea for a hotel. His idea takes off and is hugely successful. Unfortunately, fate deals him another cruel hand as the communists come to power in 1948. Inexplicably, he turns himself in to be imprisoned with all the other successful bourgeois hotel owners he has worked for. After his stint in a monastery prison, he is exiled to the now-depopulated Sudetenland to work as a roadkeeper on a road going nowhere.

The beginning of the book is fun, racy, and exciting, but as the book continues it becomes more sober, introspective, and melancholic - much like the life of an average man I suppose. Hrabal does a wonderful job of bringing characters to life and revealing much of the humor and sadness of everyday Czech life.