A Son of the Rock

Harvill, 1998, 107 p. Translated from the Czech Taneční hodiny pro starŝí pokročilé, (published by Československý spisovatel, 1964,) by Michael Henry Heim. Illustrated by Vladimír Suchánek.

This is a seemingly rambling but actually very focused assemblage of scenes and observations from our narrator Jirka’s life as he relates them to a group of ladies. It is all unveiled in a breathless style, moving from one story to another almost without pause, with the whole book comprising a single sentence, jumping hither and yon, occasionally returning to previous musings. Adding to the sense of dislocation, the book just ends, there is no full stop at its sentence’s end, as if terminated mid-flow. A literary conceit, then, like the last part of Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch.

And it is a conceit, for there are elisions in the narrative where punctuation could quite easily have been inserted. But the rush from one incident to the next is undoubtedly the point, the urgency expressing the necessity for the tales to be told – to be heard before it was perhaps too late.

It is Hrabal’s embodiment of the time and place in which it was written, impossible to imagine emanating from a luckier country. The back cover blurb describes it as “an informal history of the indomitable twentieth-century Czech spirit.” It muses on humanity’s foibles and sets great store by “Batista’s book on sexual hygiene,” or “Batista’s book about safeguards of marital bliss, which says that shivers run down a man’s spine whenever he sees a beautiful woman and his first thought is how to get her, as Bondy the poet says from the vertical to the horizontal.” It “warns men against giving in to their passions, no more than three times an afternoon or four times for Catholics, to prevent sinful thoughts from taking shape, you never know where they might lead.”

It does though at times display anti-semitic attitudes.

The illustrations are noteworthy; as eclectic as the prose, like a cross between surrealism and Terry Gilliam’s montages in <em>Monty Python’s Flying Circus</em>.

Pedant’s corner:- “I stood like Montgomery at Tobruk” (This must be an example of metonymy since I don’t think Montgomery was ever personally at Tobruk.)