Total Fears Letters to Dubenka [Paperback]

Bohumil Hrabal (Author), James Naughton (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2001

As Czechoslovakia's communist regime expired in 1989, Hrabal began to write after a long literary silence. He called his short individual texts lyrical reportage in the form of letters addressed to Dubenka (April Gifford), a visiting American student who became the muse of his later years. In these letters, spanning the period from 1989 to 1992, Hrabal gives us a memoir of humorous, moving, free association.

Editorial Reviews

Review

... extraordinary, quick, rambling, spoken, but purposeful writing. -- Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement

The conditions under which Hrabal created [his] oeuvre, the final lifting with the collapse of Communism in 1989 and their grievous, indestructible memory, are all recorded, along with visits to Britain and the Delighted States in an extraordinary series of half-imaginary letters to Dubenka a visiting American student who made a great impression on Hrabal . . . It is quick, rambling, spoken, but purposeful writing. -- Michael Hofmann, The TLS, January 29,1999

The present translated collection gives the impression of a unified body of work, written with a consistent style and voice and concentrating on particular themes. The style will be familiar to readers of Hrabal: a stream of consciousness reflection presenting a poetic train of associations . . . -- The New Presence, April, 1999

The publication of this book marks a major event . . . As an addition to English Hrabalia, Total Fears is invaluable, and unlikely to be matched for some time. -- The Prague Post, June 24, 1998

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Czech

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Product Details

• Paperback: 204 pages
• Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press (August 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8090217192
• ISBN-13: 978-8090217195
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Hrabal's Best!, April 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Total Fears Letters to Dubenka (Paperback)

Total Fears takes the form of a series of letters to an American student before and during the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia. It is equal parts a love story, a personal memoir, and aching commentary on the fears Hrabal felt during the Communist regime as both a writer suppressed by the regime and fueled by it. Hrabal, a man of afterthoughts, writes his letters much as he does in his other works, in streams of consciousness. He moves from one topic to the next and then beautifully intertwines them. Though this book does not follow a traditional plot, it is traditional Hrabal, and moves the reader to see the extraordinary in history, love, and the conflict every one of us faces inside. I was truly moved by the book. While I do not consider it to be at the level of Too Loud A Solitude, perhaps Hrabal's most successful work, it is one of the warmest books I have read in quite some time. I highly recommend it!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NOT a BUkowski, Better than a million Bukowskis, Kerouacs and Ginsbergs., September 27, 2008

By 

Natalia O. Novikova "richard wilson" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Total Fears Letters to Dubenka (Paperback)

With these letters to Dubenka(or, himself) Hrabal shows us his total self: the alcoholism, the past dreams and memories, the day to day facade, the total fear in seeing his sad visage in the mirror every day; poetic prose, rambling ?Yes, but of a man who can tell a story and wrap it all together, all the threads into one coherent, beautiful tapestry. One of the scariest and beautiful books ever written.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Randy Raunchy Rascally Old Drunkard ..., July 27, 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: Total Fears Letters to Dubenka (Paperback)

... and a Great Human Being! Only a great human being could be so honest about himself, so openly ashamed and humiliated by a life of fear, proudly apologetic for a life of carousing, honestly diffident about his worth as a writer! Honest enough also to acknowledge that even these apparently candid memoirs have been retouched to meet his literary self-image! This book -- Total Fears: Letters to Dubenka -- is not rightfully a "whole". It's a small selection from three volumes published by Hrabal AFTER the Velvet Revolution, the displacement of Soviet Communism in Czechoslovakia: November Hurricane (1990), Subterranean Streams (1991), and The Rosenkavalier (1991). Those three books were in turn collected as Volume 13 - Letters to Dubenka - the the Czech edition of Harabal's complete writings. I now wait with bated breath for a full translation of that Volume, but meanwhile this 'sampler' is something rich and fine.

"Dubenka" was Hrabal's nickname for April Gifford, a young American woman who came to Prague as a student of Slavic literature and who became Hrabal's "late life muse". Her identity is subsumed in this book into the epistolary essays Hrabal addressed to her by way of extending his memoirs past the three autobiographical 'novels' he'd already written -- In-House Weddings, Vita Nuova, & Vacant Lots -- assigning the role of narrator to his own wife, Pipsi, whose death Hrabal mourns poignantly again and again to 'Miss April'. Born in 1914, Hrabal would have been 24 in 1938, 34 in 1948, and 74 in 1988, around the time when he met April Gifford. If these years don't ring any bells in your mind, as markers on a road of life through the nastiest century in human history, then you will certainly struggle with Hrabal's allusions in this book.

Hrabal did survive, one has to register, the nastiest century in history, and one of his major themes in this set of essays is his "survivor's guilt". In fact, as he reveals, there were people in his intellectual/literary milieu who criticized him for surviving - for 'cooperating' too subserviently and submitting too easily to censorship. Hrabal's sheepish apology for not getting himself silenced or gulag imprisoned is a masterpiece of human self-revelation. But he had already survived the round-up of his fellow radical university students in '38. And the German occupation of WW2. And the Communist takeover in '48, and all the years of semi-clandestine literary renown in Czechoslovakia, and the brief wonder of the Prague Spring with the utter despair accompanying the Russian tanks after so few months of exuberance, and then, when no longer even dreamed, and what a shock it must have been, the End of Communism! These letter/essays were all written after the 1989, when Hrabal had been dourly unproductive for some years. They are therefore a late flowering of the most fragrant and flagrant beauty.

Death, old age, and suicide are also themes in this book, especially in the first essay, The Magic Flute, which was originally published separately. Hrabal had written about suicide before, of course. One might say that he'd survived that, also, i.e. his own suicidal impulses. Most Hrabal scholars do presume that his "fall from a fifth floor hospital window, while feeding pigeons" was the almost-inevitable realization of his lifelong expectancy of suicide.

The funniest, most enjoyable pages of this sampler are Hrabl's accounts of his visits to "The Delighted States" for lectures arranged by April Gifford at universities including Stanford, where she was teaching, as well as to England on a reading tour, once his post-Communist world reputation had begun to burgeon. It's both touching and hilarious to see Hrabal, one of the greatest writers of the century, star-struck at sitting in the booth once occupied by Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern -- I had precisely the same 'rush' myself, guzzling in that booth in 1963! -- and trotting around various streets of English and American cities in groupy-like imitation of Jack Kerouac, TS Eliot, Walt Whitman! Hrabal tosses off his candid and sometimes snarky evaluations of nearly every Czech and Russian writer of the century, in the course of recounting his own roisterous boozing sessions at home and abroad. Often Hrabal reminds me of the comic "wild and crazy guy" of American TV. He really was the loopy "palaverer" that he so skillfully portrayed in his novels. I would suggest reading a couple of his novels before these memoirs, by the way, beginning with "The Little Town Where Time Stood Still" and "I Served the King of England".