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Summary: I Survived the King of Overrated Books
Comment: I know I'm pretty much alone down here in two star land, but I was really disappointed by this novel. The style was irritatingly coy, cute and cliched. The narrator is insufferable. He brags about making whores fall in love with him and making absurd amounts of money selling hot dogs. Money always seems to equal happiness in this book, and there's much wasting of money too, gaily throwing it in the street and so on, to show off. Many cliches about rich people and their lovers. Is it all a spoof, a satire? Still tiresome, whatever it is. Creepy scene where he's "blessed" by Haile Selassie. Precious vignettes. Bursting at the seams with cliched phrases: "tears of joy", "a heavenly expression on his face", etc, etc (you can't blame them all on the translator). The hero is too perfect: even his flaws are "charming". A two dimensional, banal narrative masquerading as a picaresque "masterpiece".
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Summary: "I was always lucky in my bad luck."
Comment: First published and distributed secretly during the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, this tragicomic novel by Bohumil Hrabal is a first-person account by Ditie, a teenage busboy at a rural hotel who progresses to waiter, and eventually to successful hotel owner before his fall when the communists take over. The picaresque plot serves as the framework for a series of often hilarious stories about the people Ditie works with, the lives they have led, the values they maintain, their hopes for the future, and the sometimes large chasm between their dreams and reality.
Set in rural hotels, in German camps during their occupation of Czechoslovakia, and in Prague, where Ditie served, not the King of England, but Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the novel concludes at the "end of the road," where Ditie resides with his horse, goat, and cat, living on his memories and writing his autobiography--this book.
Ditie is a charming story-teller, using the casual, almost innocent language of a young boy at the beginning and becoming philosophical and contemplative by the end. Hrabal's sensitivity to small details and his accurate depiction of real people responding to real situations in sometimes odd and often darkly humorous ways make this sometimes satiric novel a delight to read. Ribald and rowdy in his descriptions of his own sexual awakening and in the stories of his customers' peccadillos, Ditie maintains his dignity when he describes the important people with whom he comes into contact--the headwaiter who "served the King of England," the President of Czechoslovakia, and eventually Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, for whom Ditie is personal waiter.
The novel takes a new, darker turn, when Ditie marries a German woman and leaves Prague to live in the mountains--at a breeding station the Germans have established to develop a "refined race of humans." Lise, his wife, travels widely for the Reich, once returning from Warsaw with a suitcase full of valuable stamps, confiscated from Jews, which guarantee their financial future. Their lives are less secure, however, and Ditie eventually dissociates himself from the Germans and tries to re-establish a life of his own, this time as the owner of a Czech hotel built with the proceeds from the sale of the stamps.
By turns hilarious and poignant, satiric and sensitive, the novel depicts many aspects of Czech society and culture, but it is, above all, the story of Ditie, in many ways a Czech everyman. With symbolism throughout, and a repeating character, Zdenek, the headwaiter who "served the King of England," who appears at every crossroads in Ditie's life, the novel is more than a comic romp. A record of a time, place, and culture, it is also Ditie's meditation on his life and his role, if any, in the wider world. Soon to be released as a major film by Academy Award-winning Czech director Jiri Menzel, who also directed the film version of Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains, this novel deserves to find a wide, long-overdue audience. n Mary Whipple
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Summary: Too Good To Be True, Therefore Better Than True
Comment: This is a fantastic novel - both literally and in the colloquial sense of that word when it is used as a hyperbolic form of praise; in this instance the praise is merited. Originally published in Czech in 1971, I Served the King of England certainly qualifies Hrabal to be considered as eminent a practitioner of "magic realism" as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or, for that matter, the Gunter Grass of The Tin Drum. If this places the author in elevated literary company, he has earned his place there.
The story begins as a picaresque autobiography of the narrator, the runt "Ditie" who recounts his adventures as a busboy and waiter in Prague and elsewhere. Amazing and awe-inspiring things happen throughout the young man's career, often involving unlikely candidates (waiters, hotel owners, traveling salesmen) for the performance of outrageous or admirable deeds. Ditie is always game for adventures, especially of an erotic nature, and his lavish descriptions of the anatomy and enthusiastic love-making of his favorite prostitutes and other girlfriends is sensually arousing while touching and humorous at the same time (an erection with a heart of gold, wreathed in flowers. as it were.) The story takes a grimmer turn when he falls in love with Lise, a Bohemian German gym-instructor who is even more diminutive than he is. He becomes her knight-errant in a situation of deteriorating relationships between Czechs and Germans as the war approaches, and in his haste to defend his lady-love's honor he turns away from his countrymen in their time of need and oppression, a decision which eventually comes to haunt and discomfit him. This leads to their marriage and his subsequent odd career as a despised waiter at a Nazi "Lebensborn" resort for young women programmatically impregnated by warrior-studs. To the music of Wagner and under the banner of duty to produce a specimen of the Teutonic New Man, he and his wife conceive a stunted, retarded child. At the war's end his wife wends her way heavenward (hellward? Or perhaps just into the ground) courtesy of an Allied bomb, and Ditie has the chance to return to his beloved venue of hotel-and-restaurant in Prague. He is not received warmly by his old colleagues, but manages to create a unique hotel in an abandoned foundry on the grounds of a quarry, using as his capital a fortune Lise looted from Polish Jews during her war service. With his stained wealth and an uneasy conscience he creates a sort of dreamy hotelier's paradise, which is soon doomed to destruction by the new political regime. There is a hilarious interlude at a newly established Communist Party "prison/reform camp" for millionaires, where the prisoners and their guards (all former miners who miss their old job) become interchangeable and totally confused about what is expected from whom - it's a wonderful parody of Lenin's who-whom rhetorical question. Throughout these adventures Ditie has been driven by the desire to become a very rich man, because as a youth he thought that rich men lived the most admirable and rewarding lives; he also desires the admiration of other rich men, especially those from the ranks of the hotel owners. After he realizes this dream he watches it go sour and be crushed. When he is released from the millionaires' prison, things take a final turn for the worse for Ditie, but only in the most superficial sense, because in his new life as an almost totally isolated rural road repairman (he has four animal companions) he discovers a kind of pantheistic tranquility and an impulse to recreate and reconsider his life by writing it all down -- the "arc" of his story is now "from-rags-to-riches-to-rags-again", with the final rags being the frowsy but durable mantle of a self-made philosopher.
The way the story is told - the characterizations and especially the language of Ditie the narrator - is as important as the tall tales themselves. This raises a tricky point. The irascible but occasionally brilliant F. Nietzsche once made the observation that "it is neither the best nor the worst" of a language which is untranslatable, implying that there is a vast range of thought and expression in the "middle" of this spectrum in which deeper meanings and emotional overtones depend upon the unique subtleties of each language and are therefore beyond translation. In a brief after-note the translator, Paul Wilson, writes, "Bohumil Hrabal's work, Czechs say, is untranslatable. This book is my response to that challenge." I don't know how truly bilingual readers evaluate his effort, but for English-language readers I can say that Wilson's translation is much more than serviceable -- it is direct, colloquial, jaunty, funny, and poetic and reflective when it needs to be. It creates a vibrant voice which the reader who does not speak Czech hopes is an authentic mirror of the original. It is definitely a voice you want to listen to, compelling and amusing. Mr. Wilson should be praised for this.
While I feel the above review does the book some justice, I also know that it is impossible to capture its animation and warmth in a brief sketch. How do I know that? Because I have read the work of the man who wrote about Ditie, the Man Who Served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and who himself was instructed by Skrivanek, the Man Who Served the King of England, and, once they -- we -- have been chosen for such estimable parts and acquitted themselves well, people like that just know certain things, don't they?
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Summary: Fellini-esque...
Comment: Ditie is the modest protagonist of this quirky, anecdotal fable set amid the backdrop of 20th century Czech history.
Hrabal's writing is detailed, and has a rolling, dreamlike rhythm that is fiercely engaging, and the novel holds up to repeat readings very well.
I was pleasantly reminded of certain Fellini films - Hrabal similarly blends fantasy and the wooziness of memory with stark and sometimes nasty historical events.
Recommended.
-David Alston
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Summary: Funny, bittersweet personal narrative of Czech man in turbulent times
Comment: Generally speaking, I don't enjoy novels translated into English as much of the eloquence and humor is lost in translation. However, I really liked this book by Bohumil Hrabal (translated by Paul Wilson). Although the book is based on the rise and fall of a fictional person, the historical background is real enough. We trace the personal history of a young man named Dite (which means child in Czech). The story begins during Czechoslovakia's first republic, the nation's golden age. Dite is working as a lowly busboy, but he has dreams and is ambitious. We are with him when he loses his virginity at the local bordello and meets his first love. Dite, always on the lookout to improve his wealth and status, takes a new job at a very prestigious elite hotel, where he meets a whole host of fascinating characters.
Unfortunately, he loses his job, but lands a new one at the swank Paris Hotel in Prague (still exists by the way). He falls in love with a Czech citizen of German ethnicity - unfortunately in 1938 when the Germans had seized the Sudetenland and some Czechs had become extremely hostile toward all ethnic Germans. (Czechs have a long history of being occupied/exploited and are consequently xenophobic.) His girlfriend Lise is attacked by an angry Czech group, and Dite seeths with anger. The tables are turned, however, when the German army occupies Prague later that year, and Dite and Lise are being served by now subservient Czechs. Dite, despite being Czech, is nominally accepted into the ethnic-German community.
His life begins taking a surrealistic turn when he lives in a Nazi-designated breeding town, Decin. Though once passionately in love with Lise, they are drawn apart as the pressures of war and Nazi ideology separate them. Typically, despite this, they have a little boy, which Dite later discovers to be somewhat retarded. When the war comes crashing through Bohemia, Dite's life with Lise lies in ruins, and he is jailed first by the Nazis and then by the Czechs. After many months in prison, he is released and is determined to start a new life.
Dite takes all the substantial savings he has accumulated over the years and invests it in a rather fantastic idea for a hotel. His idea takes off and is hugely successful. Unfortunately, fate deals him another cruel hand as the communists come to power in 1948. Inexplicably, he turns himself in to be imprisoned with all the other successful bourgeois hotel owners he has worked for. After his stint in a monastery prison, he is exiled to the now-depopulated Sudetenland to work as a roadkeeper on a road going nowhere.
The beginning of the book is fun, racy, and exciting, but as the book continues it becomes more sober, introspective, and melancholic - much like the life of an average man I suppose. Hrabal does a wonderful job of bringing characters to life and revealing much of the humor and sadness of everyday Czech life.
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