Once Milan Kundera was my favorite Czech author. And I do love "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "The Joke." But traveling in the Czech Republic in 1999 and 2004 I was surprised to learn he was not so popular there. (ULB was not even in-print in Czech for many years until recently.) Mostly I think because he was an expat who moved to France in 1975, became a Frech citizen, and began to write in French. But he is also not typically Czech in style. Czechs don't identify with him the way they do with writers like Hrabal or Hasek. When I expressed my admiration of Kundera, I was told I should try Hrabal. Since 2004 I have read all the Hrabal that has been translated--a dozen works.
Hrabal and his character Hrabal, like Hasek and his character Svejk, are inveterate palaverers. (Kundera is more of a philosopher.) Palavering is a Czech hobby, mostly occuring in the pub. Hrabal's novels do not have much of a plot--but they have story lines. It is in the stories and how they are told that the interest lies. If you don't love the words, you won't love the books. So it is amazing to me that the charm survives translation from Czech to English. There are big differences between the languages that make translation problematic. And both Hasek's and Hrabal's novels have been called untranslatable. So I'm sure there is much to admire in this translation. Or else Hrabal's way with words transcends his way with Czech.
This autobiographical novel is told from the point of view of Hrabal's wife. It takes place in the years just before and after the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet reaction. At the end they are moving out of their old apartment, and she looks around and recalls many scenes portrayed in his novels. She concludes:
"I stood here dazzled by those images I thought were long gone and buried in the past, I stood here in the little courtyard and as plain as day could recount that life of mine, from the moment I first set foot here and saw that man through the open twilit window washing floors, that man who was to be my husband, I saw myself in those days before we met, as the woman who had wanted to commit suicide, but once I was with my husband I had neither the time nor the inclination for such thoughts, for over the years my husband had so engaged me, frustrated and enraged me, that I had even forgot to have a child of my own, my husband was enough of a handful...I shrugged, what can you do? In tears I ran down the stairs, to smudge my sleeves on the peeling walls one last time..." (I did not insert the ellipses.)
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