Enter the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague,the steelworks run by singed men,the covered market that smells of new-born babes,the cacophonous open-air dance hall. Mr Kafka is avoiding his landlady's blueberry wine breath,a stonemason witnesses the destruction of a monument to Stalin he risked his life to build,and factory men strain to catch a glimpse of a beautiful bathing murderess. In these newly discovered stories,Hrabal captures men and women in an eerily beautiful nightmare and their spirit in all its misery and splendour.
MEDIA REVIEWS
Publisher: Vintage PublishingISBN: 9781784871178Number of pages: 160Weight: 120 gDimensions: 196 x 129 x 14 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
Hrabal's magical stories are comic and human... They inhabit a utopian province,the realm of laughter and tears... A great writerHrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism,somewhere between fairytale and satire. He is a most sophisticated novelist,with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read himThe discovery of Hrabal's style is very simple. It makes pleasure a principle... Each of Hrabal's novels describes a spiral,a constant intricate movement between pleasure and fear and guilt and delight: they describe the difficult effort to be a hedonist in a world where pleasure has disappeareOne of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague,an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imaginationWritten 50 years ago,in a country whose system of government is utterly alien to our lived experience,these stories are still laugh-aloud funny on pretty much every page
Kommentar