Publication
Vintage Classics (2009), 288 pages
Original publication date
1971
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Description
A comic, picaresque novel set against the backdrop of twentieth-century Czech history, about the rise and fall of an ambitious busboy in Prague.
User reviews
LibraryThing member jahjahdub
I was in Sherborne, thinking about this book, about how I’d been looking at it in Waterstones the week before, weighing it in my palm before deciding to leave it for another day. Ahead was a street market. One of the stalls had a selection of a couple of hundred books. This was one of them; it
This fortuitous discovery, and my wistful romanticizing of Prague and the author (mainly from this photo), may have led to unrealistic expectations. I was really really ready to love this book.
And for the first half, I did. Now, Europe east of Germany acts as this hemisphere’s South America - when novels aren’t magical realist there’s always the feeling that they might go that way. Need I say that the story is against a backdrop of Czech history from the ‘30s through to the communist ‘50s? Do I have to mention that Dittie is a very small man? Comparisons with the Tin Drum are inevitable and obvious - next time someone talks about the Tin Drum say you've read this, and isn't it interesting that European literature responded to the Nazi past through stunted seducers? I don't have anything to add on the issue. I'd leave it hanging - you should too.
The breaking out of war changes the novel. From erotic adventures in brothels we come to marriage with a Nazi. It was refreshing to have a character associating with the Germans, but from here on the novel seems to lose its coherence and become one damn thing after another.
Hrabal was said to write in Hrabalovština, a playful use of Czech and probably untranslatable. He did about enough for me to want to try another of his books: he still has my respect, but for now I’m withholding my love.
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was fate, I bought it for £2.This fortuitous discovery, and my wistful romanticizing of Prague and the author (mainly from this photo), may have led to unrealistic expectations. I was really really ready to love this book.
And for the first half, I did. Now, Europe east of Germany acts as this hemisphere’s South America - when novels aren’t magical realist there’s always the feeling that they might go that way. Need I say that the story is against a backdrop of Czech history from the ‘30s through to the communist ‘50s? Do I have to mention that Dittie is a very small man? Comparisons with the Tin Drum are inevitable and obvious - next time someone talks about the Tin Drum say you've read this, and isn't it interesting that European literature responded to the Nazi past through stunted seducers? I don't have anything to add on the issue. I'd leave it hanging - you should too.
The breaking out of war changes the novel. From erotic adventures in brothels we come to marriage with a Nazi. It was refreshing to have a character associating with the Germans, but from here on the novel seems to lose its coherence and become one damn thing after another.
Hrabal was said to write in Hrabalovština, a playful use of Czech and probably untranslatable. He did about enough for me to want to try another of his books: he still has my respect, but for now I’m withholding my love.
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LibraryThing member LyzzyBee
Acquired via BookCrossing 28 May 2011 (Hare and Hounds meetup)
A kind of fantasy set in pre-WWII and wartime Czech Republic. This could obviously be read at many different levels, and I just as obviously missed a lot of the satirical element, but it was an interesting and amusing (if that's the
A kind of fantasy set in pre-WWII and wartime Czech Republic. This could obviously be read at many different levels, and I just as obviously missed a lot of the satirical element, but it was an interesting and amusing (if that's the
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word) story in its own right (if a little rude!) and I didn't mind the animal violence as much as usual as it was clearly metaphorical. My attention did wander a little towards the end, but overall a good and unusual read. MUCH better than Unbearable Lightness of Being!! Show Less
LibraryThing member gbill
‘I Served the King of England’ starts off humorously, with the narrator, a young hotel busboy, describing various guests and how he makes money on the side by selling frankfurters at the railroad station and conveniently not having change for their big bills. However, it quickly starts
It takes awhile to get there, but the third and fourth chapters (out of five total) are good, when the Nazis take over the Czechoslovakia and the narrator finds himself in love with a German woman, then subjects himself to a humiliating physical examination before being permitted to marry her. Tellingly, their son, supposedly a part of the future superior Aryan race, is mentally retarded, and this portion of the book ends with a very moving scene.
It is interesting to read Hrabal’s expression of Czech zeitgeist in the 1970’s, having endured the Nazis and then the Soviets, and in the case of the narrator, having guilt for having profited in WWII from plunder taken from the Jews, and yet, through it all, keeping a lightness, and a madcap zaniness about them. It’s an easy book to rate for me though. Four stars for chapters three and four, and two and a half stars for the rest of it.
Quotes:
On the beauty of nature:
“It wasn’t a small hotel, as I’d been expecting, but a small town or a large village surrounded by woods, with hot springs in the forest and air so fresh you could have put it in a cup. All you had to do was turn and face the pleasant breeze and drink it in freely, as fish breathe through their gills, and you could hear the oxygen mixed with ozone flowing through your gills, and your lungs and vital parts would gradually pump up, as though earlier, somewhere down in the valley, long before, you’d got a flat tire, and it was only now, in this air, that you’d got it automatically pumped back up to a pressure that was safer and nicer to drive on.”
On love:
“We looked at each other as though we were both naked, and again that white film came over her eyes, the kind of look women get when they are ready to cast aside the last shred of inhibition and let themselves be treated any way that seems right at the moment, when a different world opens up, a world of love games and wantonness. She gave me a long, slow kiss in front of everyone, and I closed my eyes, and as we kissed, our champagne glasses tilted in our fingers and the wine slowly spilled out onto the tablecloth, and all the guests were silent.”
On having only a few moments left before saying goodbye; this as the German soldiers were about to leave for the Russian Front:
“Only now have I got to the core of it, that what made these people beautiful was knowing that they might never see each other again. The New Man was not the victor, loud-mouthed and vain, but the man who was humble and solemn, with the beautiful eyes of a terrified animal. And so through the eyes of these lovers – because even married couples became lovers again with the dangers of the front hanging over them – I learned to see the countryside, the flowers on the tables, the children at play, and to see that every hour is a sacrament. The day and the night before the departure for the front, the lovers didn’t sleep, but they weren’t necessarily in bed either, because there was something more here than bed: there were eyes and special feeling, like seeing a sad, romantic play or movie in a large theater or movie house. I also learned that the closest that one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or sometimes a military britzska, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet, gazing long at each other, a sigh, then a final kiss, then the man standing in the britzska, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief.”
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meandering with a style that feels like one anecdote after another concatenated together as he moves from one hotel to the next. There is some sex thrown in here and there, starting with him early on discovering an “aim for life” after visiting Paradise’s, a local brothel, but it doesn’t feel all that honest, such as the time prostitutes find themselves so aroused after being poked and prodded by a bunch of rich old men that they need him to skillfully ‘finish what they began’. (ugh) It takes awhile to get there, but the third and fourth chapters (out of five total) are good, when the Nazis take over the Czechoslovakia and the narrator finds himself in love with a German woman, then subjects himself to a humiliating physical examination before being permitted to marry her. Tellingly, their son, supposedly a part of the future superior Aryan race, is mentally retarded, and this portion of the book ends with a very moving scene.
It is interesting to read Hrabal’s expression of Czech zeitgeist in the 1970’s, having endured the Nazis and then the Soviets, and in the case of the narrator, having guilt for having profited in WWII from plunder taken from the Jews, and yet, through it all, keeping a lightness, and a madcap zaniness about them. It’s an easy book to rate for me though. Four stars for chapters three and four, and two and a half stars for the rest of it.
Quotes:
On the beauty of nature:
“It wasn’t a small hotel, as I’d been expecting, but a small town or a large village surrounded by woods, with hot springs in the forest and air so fresh you could have put it in a cup. All you had to do was turn and face the pleasant breeze and drink it in freely, as fish breathe through their gills, and you could hear the oxygen mixed with ozone flowing through your gills, and your lungs and vital parts would gradually pump up, as though earlier, somewhere down in the valley, long before, you’d got a flat tire, and it was only now, in this air, that you’d got it automatically pumped back up to a pressure that was safer and nicer to drive on.”
On love:
“We looked at each other as though we were both naked, and again that white film came over her eyes, the kind of look women get when they are ready to cast aside the last shred of inhibition and let themselves be treated any way that seems right at the moment, when a different world opens up, a world of love games and wantonness. She gave me a long, slow kiss in front of everyone, and I closed my eyes, and as we kissed, our champagne glasses tilted in our fingers and the wine slowly spilled out onto the tablecloth, and all the guests were silent.”
On having only a few moments left before saying goodbye; this as the German soldiers were about to leave for the Russian Front:
“Only now have I got to the core of it, that what made these people beautiful was knowing that they might never see each other again. The New Man was not the victor, loud-mouthed and vain, but the man who was humble and solemn, with the beautiful eyes of a terrified animal. And so through the eyes of these lovers – because even married couples became lovers again with the dangers of the front hanging over them – I learned to see the countryside, the flowers on the tables, the children at play, and to see that every hour is a sacrament. The day and the night before the departure for the front, the lovers didn’t sleep, but they weren’t necessarily in bed either, because there was something more here than bed: there were eyes and special feeling, like seeing a sad, romantic play or movie in a large theater or movie house. I also learned that the closest that one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or sometimes a military britzska, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet, gazing long at each other, a sigh, then a final kiss, then the man standing in the britzska, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief.”
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LibraryThing member technodiabla
What a glorious novel. Set in pre- to post-WW2, it tells the life story of a Czech busboy turned millionaire who loses everything (or does he?) The writing style changes as the man matures. The first half is comic stream of conscious and gets a little tedious, but if you can get to the halfway
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point, the rest of the book is pure genius and 100% enjoyable. The history of its publication and the author is also pretty interesting. I would highly recommend this book to a reader patient enough to get through the first half-- which is funny and amusing, but gets a little old after a while. I actually think this is intentional, but still tedious. The second half of the book flew by (like the second half of our lives?). Show Less
LibraryThing member Clurb
A first-person account of working in Czechoslovakia's hotel industry around the war years, which was full of funny anecdotes but ambled and dragged its heels. I had to give up about three quarters of the way through in despair of reaching the end and having had nothing happen.
LibraryThing member thorold
Engaging picaresque tale of a waiter's rise and fall, set against the background of mid-20th century Czech history. There are obvious echoes of The Tin Drum; like Grass, he struggles a bit to keep up the momentum in the post-war section of the book. There are some wonderful images in the earlier
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chapters that come across very effectively even in Paul Wilson's rather stodgy (and very North American) translation. I suspect that the sense of anticlimax we get in the later chapters might have a lot to do with the difficulties of rendering Hrabal's apparently very individual style into English. Of course, the book was published (secretly) only three years after 1968, and the Soviet invasion, never mentioned, probably has a lot to do with the very pessimistic tone of the ending. Show Less
LibraryThing member g026r
2.5 stars, as there's half a very good book here, and half a very bad one. To the book's detriment, the majority of the very bad book is all front-loaded. The first two (out of five) sections, which meander with no real purpose, could easily be excised entirely with little to no damage to the book.
Things pick up once World War 2 starts, with the annexation, followed by liberation and rise of Communism in Czechoslovakia, but by then the damage to the narrative has been done. (Which isn't to say that there aren't still missteps, but by this point they're the exception — particularly the overly detailed sex scenes that pop up from time to time — rather than the rule.) A reader willing to slog through the first half of the book will be rewarded, but I'm not entirely certain it was worth it.
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A reader who makes it all the way to the end wonders if Hrabal himself realized the weakness of the first two sections, as a passing comment by Ditie, the narrator, disparages how the book began.Things pick up once World War 2 starts, with the annexation, followed by liberation and rise of Communism in Czechoslovakia, but by then the damage to the narrative has been done. (Which isn't to say that there aren't still missteps, but by this point they're the exception — particularly the overly detailed sex scenes that pop up from time to time — rather than the rule.) A reader willing to slog through the first half of the book will be rewarded, but I'm not entirely certain it was worth it.
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LibraryThing member datrappert
Extraordinary. Quite simply one of the greatest things I have read in my life. The first-person narrative of a waiter in pre-WW2 Czechoslovakia, it begins in a predominately comic vein as it tells a coming of age story highlighted by an encounter with the Emperor of Ethiopia, then turns deadly
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serious as World War 2 starts and the Nazis take over his homeland--not to his detriment, however, as he has managed to captivate a beautiful German gym instructor whom he marries, with the permission of the Nazi party, in one of the book's most memorable juxtapositions of the ridiculous and the horrific. But it is the post-war section that truly seals the novel's greatness, as the waiter's financial success segues into a comic prison sequence that ends with his more or less banishment to the forest. The closing sequences, with his faithful animal friends, are about as good as writing can get. This book pretty much captures everything there is about life, about self-discovery, about happiness, about wealth, about friendship, about love--about all things--in its 241 pages. I feel privileged to have read it. In a house with hundreds of books I will never live long enough to even open, I'm happy my hands pulled this one out of the stack. Show Less
LibraryThing member snash
A Czech farce set against the history of the mid 1900's. It mirrors life in that it's fairly silly and pointless in the beginning but much more serious and contemplative towards the end.
LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
A work of staggering genius, with a likewise genius translation courtesy of Paul Wilson, this book follows the life and misadventures of the diminutive waiter, Ditie, in the Czech Republic of the mid-twentieth century. I can't say too much without divulging the plot, but if like me you've been
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thirsting after novels that carry the same tone and atmosphere of those of Roberto Bolano, this will be just your cup of tea. Show Less
LibraryThing member fmclellan
Oddly brilliant.
Language
Original language
Czech
ISBN
0099540932 / 9780099540939
Physical description
288 p.; 7.8 inches
Pages
288