Your unusual dish of everything.
Posts tagged novel
Bohumil Hrabal’s “I Served the King of England”
May 25th
What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’
Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote. There is a comedy, and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large (‘for all mankind’) that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the ‘tiny black cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism.
Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence by the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997. The character relieving himself of this little confession is a garrulous cobbler, who admits to being ‘an admirer of the European Renaissance’, and is the narrator of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age.
And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia – but sometimes he says something wise or prescient, and whenever he is complimented for this, he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’
Hrabal wrote in an expressive, highly visual style. He affected the use of long sentences; in fact his work, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé) (1964) consists of a single sentence! Political quandaries and their concomitant moral ambiguities are a recurrent theme. Many of Hrabal’s characters are portrayed as “wise fools” – simpletons with occasional inadvertently profound thoughts – who are also given to coarse humour, lewdness, and a determination to survive and enjoy oneself despite harsh circumstances.
Much of the impact of Hrabal’s writing derives from his juxtaposition of the beauty and cruelty found in everyday life.
The 2006 Czech film, I Served the King of England, directed by Jiří Menzel and based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal. This film is Menzel’s sixth adaptation of the works of Hrabal for film. The film was released in the UK and in the US in 2008.
A must-see. Here’s the trailer and the review on rottentomatoes.com.
A. J. Cronin: The Citadel
Jul 17th
Robert Donat as Dr. Andrew Manson
A.J.Cronin (1896-1981) was born in Scotland. He wrote over 30 books, several of which were filmed or televised, a recent example being Dr. Finlay’s Case Book. He trained in various hospitals, finding himself a naval surgeon as World War One dragged on, and finally graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1919. He then moved to a mining town in South Wales.
The Citadel, a tremendously popular book from 1937, is semi-autobiographical in its first sections.
It is an episodic sort of novel, unified by the passage of one life over time, and with a trajectory through suffering into a kind of grace. It works as a forum for Cronin’s political, socialistic conceptions of medicine, and has been credited with stimulating the creation of the famed National Health Service of the United Kingdom. More >
