{"id":11841,"date":"2014-03-28T07:52:21","date_gmt":"2014-03-28T11:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11841"},"modified":"2014-03-28T07:52:21","modified_gmt":"2014-03-28T11:52:21","slug":"happy-hundredth-hrabal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/happy-hundredth-hrabal\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Hundredth Hrabal!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A king without a country, but with a vast realm of imagination. \u2013 The writer Bohumil Hrabal, Prag 1993. (Picture: Miroslav Zajic \/ Corbis \/ Dukas)<\/p><\/div>\n

Today is the 100th B-day of the great Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal<\/strong> (1914-1997) &, by a quirk Hrabal would have approved of, yesterday the post man brought Hrabal’s Harlequin’s Millions<\/em><\/strong>, translated by Stacey Knecht & published by that ever excellent press, Archipelago Books<\/strong><\/a>. One of the most subversive figures of Czech \u2014 actually of East European, & even plainly of European mi-century literature \u2014 Hrabal is the ultimate gabber, or, the Germans would say, Bafler. Interesting word, this “bafeln: it’s Yiddish roots – \u05d1\u05d0\u05e4\u05e2\u05dc\u05df \\ba-FEL-en\\ \u00a0link the original meaning to a sequence that etymologically\u00a0derives from Middle High German \u201cbevelhen,\u201d from Old High German \u201cbifelahan, bifelhan,\u201d itself from Proto-Germanic\u00a0*felhanan<\/em>\u00a0(to conceal, hide, bury, trust, intrude) and the Proto-Indo-European root\u00a0*pele(w)-<\/em>\u00a0(to hide) before it.\u00a0Cognates include Middle English \u201cfelen,\u201d\u00a0Modern English \u201cfeal,\u201d\u00a0New High German \u201cbefehlen.\u201d \u00a0Thus to command, order,\u00a0convey, communicate. But turned on its head, bafeln has become derision of authority, just talking, gabbing, joking, telling tall tales, etc. \u2014 not as the commanders do, but as the little people do, those to whom Hrabal lends his voice, his humor, his vision, undermining successfully the reinforced concrete cathedral of social realism (as\u00a0Alena Wagnerov\u00e1 put it today in the NZZ<\/a>).\u00a0As Hrabal says elsewhere, “A respectable book isn’t meant to help the reader fall sleep more easily, but should make him jump out of bed in his his long johns to deliver a few smacks to the writer’s head.”<\/p>\n

Treat yourselves & get Harlequin’s Millions<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, which is, as the publisher’s site accurately says, “a beautiful novel peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Poised on the threshold between joy and melancholy, this novel allows us into the mind of a woman coming to terms with the passing of time.”\u00a0Ivan Vladislavi\u0107’s <\/strong>blurb reads:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Hrabal is a master at using the roles, rules and atmospheres of a particular place \u2013 the railway station of\u00a0Closely Observed Trains, the hotel dining rooms of\u00a0I Served the King of England\u00a0\u2013 to explore a world of human experience. In\u00a0Harlequin\u2019s Millions, the setting is a castle on the edge of a \u201ctown where time stood still,\u201d formerly the seat of Count \u0160pork, now a retirement home for the district\u2019s pensioners. In this apparently confined space, he unfolds an expansive drama of old age and death, the fragile beauty of memory, and the persistence of desire. The book is infused with the memory of \u201cold times\u201d and a melancholy awareness of lost youth and faded beauty. Time does not stand still, it flows on relentlessly, and we carry the past with us only in stories. Hrabal\u2019s light, cascading prose, with its resistant undercurrents of pauses, diversions and repetitions, is perfectly suited to his themes. He carries you along on a sensuous rush of detail, and then suddenly bumps you against the bedrock of history. This is a mesmerizing novel, beautifully translated.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"HarlequinsMillions-cvr-4\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the 100th B-day of the great Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) &, by a quirk Hrabal would have approved of, yesterday the post man brought Hrabal’s Harlequin’s Millions, translated by Stacey Knecht...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,22,905,1283,103],"tags":[1522],"class_list":["post-11841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-launch","category-book-review","category-europe","category-novel","category-translation","tag-bohumil-hrabal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11841"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11845,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11841\/revisions\/11845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}