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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Hrabal's magical stories are comic and human... They inhabit a utopian province, the realm of laughter and tears... A great writer -- James Wood * London Review of Books * Hrabal 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 him -- Julian Barnes The 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 disappeare -- Adam Thirlwell * Guardian * One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination -- Milan Kundera Written 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 * Spectator * Laugh-aloud funny on pretty much every page. -- Nicholas Lezard * Spectator *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 126 mm
Dicke: 15 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-78487-117-8 (9781784871178)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his "hyper-realist" texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. In February 1997 he flew out of his hospital window never to return.
