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.)

Vintage Classics, 2019, 150 p, including 6 p Translator’s Afterword. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson.

These are stories set in and around Prague in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the city was still recovering from the Second World War. Several of them are situated in a steel works with apparently no safety protocols and with workers culled from various former walks of life. Misogynistic attitudes which in those days would have been unquestioned do not bear much scrutiny to the modern eye.

Concentrating on ordinary encounters and snatches of conversation exhibited in all their bizarrerie Hrabal achieves a kind of heightened realism, emphasising that nothing is truly ordinary, the grimmest of industrial settings assuming a fantastical aspect. In the circumstances that pertained in that time and place, though, the ordinary bordered on the subversive. At bottom, resorting to the ordinary is the only defence against oppression, authoritarian or otherwise.

In Mr Kafka a character named Franz Kafka strolls the streets of Prague describing all the strange encounters he has.
Strange People concerns a labour dispute in the steel works, riffs ironically on the worker’s State and provides a glimpse into the many ways in which people cope with their working environment.
The putative Angel is the overseer of a penal workforce who likes to think of himself as protecting his charges. They themselves perform small acts of human consolation as they get on with their work.
In Ingots a merchant and a doctor of philosophy discuss the times as they load up hoppers with scrap metal while a woman meant to be starting a jail sentence the next day has to succumb to the (lack of) comfort of strangers. The doctor of philosophy says, “And what’ll become of you? The same as all this scrap. The tools of your trade … you’ll be ingots too. This new age is melting you all down.”
A Betrayal of Mirrors presents fragments of a hot summer, boys practising the Czech wall pass, a stonemason repairing a statue of St Jude Thaddeus, submissions to an art exhibition, schoolchildren’s responses to the question of how to make the country an even more beautiful place, the preparations for the demolition of a statue of a figure referred to as the Generalissimo (but in reality Stalin.)
Unusually for this book Breaking Through the Drum is a single-stranded narrative which it is tempting to look on as an allegory of the Cold War. In it, amid some philosophising about the moral nature of ticket collecting, a conscientious ticket collector who has worked himself up to ticket taker for the Prague Municipal Symphony Orchestra in the Waldstein Gardens, which is separated from the St Thomas brewery, where Mr Polata’s Sumava Regional Brass Band plays in the beer garden, by a high wall, the two seemingly in competition, uses a ladder one evening to look over the wall. He sees the beer garden is overlooked by a former monastery now a home for old women and he perceives the patrons there are dancing “for the old women to see, these women who no longer had anyone to touch, who would never again be embraced that way, which was why the old women’s eyes sparkled as they did, why they glowed with longing and envy and resentment; and I saw that there were walls not just dividing symphonic music from brass music, but people from people as well, walls far more real than the one I was sitting on.”
Sharing as narrator the same Kafka as the first story in this collection Beautiful Poldi is Hrabal’s hymn to the steelworks to which he was assigned in the “Putting 77,000 to Work” scheme introduced by the post-war Communist government. Apart from featuring overheard observations on the bus to work and dialogue between Kafka and his colleagues we also see the nightly performance of a woman in the next-door convict barracks, well aware of her male audience peering through the knotholes in the fence. In the end though, “Everything exists in the elasticity of perspective, and life itself is illusion, deformation, perspective ….”

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian, organdie (organdie,) “the one who hung himself” (does this confusion between ‘hung’ and ‘hanged’ exist in Czech?) a missing end quotation mark, “reached into to the aquarium” (no ‘to’ needed,) “lay it against his cheek” (past tense, laid it,) “where the part ran through his thick hair” (parting,) “put then into a box” (put them,) “like a aureola” (an aureola.) “Aw shucks” (does not seem to me to be a likely Czech expression,) wolfram (that metal’s modern name in English is tungsten.)

Time for Reader in the Wilderness’s meme again.

These shelves contain my paperbacks of fiction translated from languages other than English. Evidence here of my usual suspects – Bohumil Hrabal, Mario Vargas Llosa, Naguib Mahfouz, Diego Marani, Gabriel García Márquez, Irène Némirovsky, Orhan Pamuk, but nearly all of these have been worth reading. In fact I would say there are no real duds here. The English language books on the lower shelf belong to the good lady and are shelved there because they fit into the space:-

Several really large hardbacks are too big to sit on the above shelves so have to be kept separately. These are not all translations but there is more Orhan Pamuk, more Naguib Mahfouz, more Irène Némirovsky, and then the English language Salman Rushdie. The John Updike omnibus is the good lady’s:-

Abacus, 2011, 173 p, plus x p Introduction by Josef Škvorecký. Translated from the Czech, Mĕstečko, kde se zastavil čas (A Small Town Where Time Has Stopped,) by James Naughton.

It makes sense to publish this story in the same volume as Cutting it Short since it carries on the story of Francin Czilágová and his cousin Uncle Pepin from that tale.

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still has an odd narrative, though, since it starts being narrated by the son of Francin and Anna, describing how, inspired by the tattoos of the working men at the Bridge Inn (where the patrons are much amused by tales of the local priest Dean Spurný lifting his maids up to the ceiling by the leg of the chair they’re sitting on so that their skirts flap round their cheeks) he wished to have a tattoo of a small boat. Mr Alois obliges him but when he finally sees his tattoo it is of a stark naked mermaid. Thereafter the narrator’s own life is as if forgotten and the novel reverts to the life story of his father, Francin, and Uncle Pepin.

By now Francin has swapped his Orion motor-bike for a Škoda 430 car, which, despite it never going wrong, unlike the Orion, he still takes apart every weekend to see why it works so well. Pepin is still riddled with nostalgia for the old Empire and for the pair, “time was slowly standing still while another time, of different people, was out there full of its own élan and new energy and endeavour.”

Details of everyday life fill the pages while wider events take place more or less off stage. The Second World War is almost an incidental occurrence, impinging little on the town even though Pepin gets into a confrontation with Mr Friedrich, in his Reichs uniform, over whether Austrian or German soldiers would win, Pepin insistent that, “Austrian soliders will ever be victorious,” with an almost pantomime exchange of “wills” and “won’ts” kept up between them over the years afterwards. The arrival of Soviet troops is marked by Pepin being involved in a dancing competition with them.

When the brewery is taken over by the workers they agree Francin had been good to them – unlike the chairman – but they explain that made his behaviour worse as it had served to reconcile them to the old regime. The way the brewery is managed from then on is viewed by the text with a critical eye (not the sort of thing to endear Hrabal to the authorities that were) as Francin and Uncle Pepin carry on seeing the world in the same old way. The progress that wasn’t is all but an irrelevance to them as they continue to live in their minds in a town where time stood still.

Except it didn’t. Pepin becomes bed-ridden, and Francin realises, “what a benefit it was for an old person to be able to do things for himself, not to be dependent on people” and on watching a cemetery being torn up that, despite some resistance, “they had succeeded, they had to succeed, in tearing those old times out of the ground.”

Once again the text is sprinkled with Scottish terms; Hogmanay, ploutering, and wee (for small.)

Pedant’s corner:- vicarage (is this the correct word for a priest’s house?) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “ammonium” (ammonium carbonate I should think, ie smelling salts,) missus’ (missus’s,) galop (gallop,) bandoleer (bandolier.)

In The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Abacus, 2011, 134 p. Translated from the Czech, Postřižiny (Cutting,) by James Naughton.

From the sixty-metre chimney of the limited-liability municipal brewery it is obvious that the small town where this short novel is set is situated on an island in the Elbe. The story is narrated by Anna Czilágová, (born Kalovice, in Moravia.) Her husband, Francin, manages the brewery and loves order and regularity. They are somewhat ill-matched as Anna loves chance and the unexpected. Francin constantly complains that the ways she does things are not suitable for a decent woman. Only when she is sick can he feel that she needs him as much as he needs her. He owns an Orion motor-bike, which very rarely survives an outing without breaking down and which he sequentially invites every man in the town to help him service (which takes hours) so that they avoid his eye thereafter.

Uncle Pepin, actually Francin’s cousin, descends on the couple one day to stay for a week or so but never leaves. In his spare time he frequents only drinking establishments which have ladies’ service. He is a hit with the ladies, or likes to think he is. Nostalgic for the old Empire, Pepin’s recurring phrase is, “a soldier of Austria can never be defeated.”

Anna’s golden hair (which is always lifted out of the way by the local shopkeepers as she mounts her bicycle to keep it from tangling in the wheels,) which she had to avoid treading on on the way up, flies out like a beacon in the wind, where she sits having scaled the brewery chimney with Uncle Pepin, watching the fire brigade called out to rescue them from their perch, as those below thought they were engaged in a suicide attempt. This is only one of the scenes which have a magical realist feel, but there is also a layering of everyday detail, as when Anna helps the local butcher to make sausages, or she consumes cream horns (in an unsuitable unlady-like manner, of course.)

The new fashion comes to the town with the advent of wireless, soldiers bringing in the apparatus, allowing everyone in turn access to an earpiece with the sound, but thinner, stretched out, of a brass band playing Kolíne, Kolíne all the way from Prague. In the build-up to the book’s final significant event various things get cut short, the brewery chairman’s horse’s mane and tail, Anna’s skirt, her dog’s tail.

A curiosity is that the story is partly translated into Scots. At first, because the words appeared in Pepin’s speech, I wondered if this was an attempt to represent a regional Czech accent but then Scots words (doucely, spale, wame) cropped up in the main text. (The translator was brought up in Edinburgh.)

Pedant’s corner:- “the dynamo pumping the …… where the light bulbs shine, the dynamo starts to” (dynamo was probably repeated in the original Czech but its repeat is superfluous,) maw (it’s a stomach, not a mouth.) “‘Direktion!’” (why use the German spelling?) pelargonias (pelargoniums. If, in any case, the word had a Greek plural it would be pelargonia,) Jesus’ (Jesus’s,) “hundred of barrels” (‘hundreds’.)

Translated from the Czech Příliš hlučna samota, by Michael Henry Heim.
Harcourt, 1990. 98p.

Like Closely Observed Trains this book is short, indeed barely a novella, but it is beautifully written (and well translated into USian.)

For thirty five years Hanta has been compacting paper in a cellar room overrun with mice. During this time he has salvaged hundreds of rare books and stored them in his flat where they take up all the space and even hang over his bed, like a sword of Damocles ready to fall.

Spiced up with reminiscences of Hanta’€™s early life and encounters with his suppliers and his boss there is a characteristic Eastern European air of strangeness about the novella which borders on magic realism but does not quite stray into it. While Hanta is working he sometimes has visions of various philosophers, plus Jesus and Lao-Tze, and ruminates on the fate of the mice caught up in his compactor, the battles between rats occurring beneath his feet and the necessities of having an “€œother”€ to confront.

The routine of his job is underlined by the repetition in nearly every chapter’€™s first line of his statement about thirty five years spent compacting paper. This could be a metaphor for the dreariness of life under a dictatorship, or just of a relatively uneventful life in general. Yet there is incident too, little sparks of colour, variation and human interaction.

The book is effectively a monologue, with little dialogue to speak of, presenting a bleak outlook on life – and, surprisingly for an Eastern European novel, absolutely no sex (although a gypsy woman does offer) – but Hrabal nevertheless engages our empathy and sympathy. Despite not having the same burden of history to freight the narrative Too Loud A Solitude easily stands comparison to Closely Observed Trains in terms of its examination of the human condition.

Translated from the Czech, Nesnesitelná lehkost byti, by Michael Henry Heim.
Faber, 1995. 305 p.

This is a book to bring home how parochial and inward looking most fiction written in the English language is. There is no possible way that The Unbearable Lightness Of Being could have been written by a British or US author, or indeed any other anglophile. The mind set, the life experiences and especially the history it is written from are all too different. While the thrust of this book is by no means the same, I was reminded by its sensibility of the work of Bohumil Hrabal – not surprisingly also a Czech author.

The book is unusual in another sense; it breaks most of the rules that aspiring writers are advised to adhere to. A lot of the action is told to us rather than shown, Kundera addresses the reader directly, inserts his opinions into the narrative, tells us his interpretations of the characters. He also messes with chronology (admittedly not a major drawback, if one at all) and parenthetically gives us important information about some characters in sections which ostensibly deal with others. In parts, especially in the author’s musings on kitsch as the denial of the existence of crap – in all its senses – in the world, it reads as a treatise rather than an exploration of the human condition. That is, at times it is not fiction at all.

Kundera is highly regarded, so is this the essence of high art in fiction? That, as well as dealing with “important” subjects – or perhaps being considered to be circumscribed yet still endeavouring to tell truth to power (whatever truth may be) – the author should step beyond the bounds of narrative; of story?

The problem with such an approach is that it tends to undermine suspension of disbelief. The characters become too obviously constructs; the reader is in danger of losing sympathy, or empathy, with them; or indeed to care. It is a fine line to tread.

Where The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is not unusual is in its treatment of those novelistic eternals love, sex and death. Indeed at times it seems to be fixated on sex.

While the exigencies of living in a totalitarian state do colour the narrative, the treatment is matter of fact, oblique, almost incidental. The choices the characters make merely fall within the constraints of such a system. It is true, however, that something similar could be said for characters in any milieu. There are constraints on us all.

What I did find disappointing was that rather than finish, the book just seemed to stop. While the fates of the characters Kundera leaves us with are already known, this hardly seemed fair. “Leave them wanting more” may be an old showbiz adage but in the context of a one-off novel might be thought to be a failing.

Abacus, 1995. 91p

Translated from the Czech, Ostře sledované vlaky (Close Watch On The Trains,) by Edith Pargeter.

This slim book, 91 pages of strikingly wide margins, constitutes no more than a novella, but is full of incident. It also treats of those novelistic big issues, love, sex and death.

In early 1945 various railway workers play out their lives against a backdrop of military and passenger train movements through their strategic location, a small railway station in Bohemia. The novella’€™s denouement takes place against the fire-bombing of Dresden lighting up the night sky.

Graduate trainee Miloš Hrma comes from a long line of eccentrics, one of whom tried to stop the German invasion in 1939 by the power of hypnosis alone – before being crushed by a tank. In his private life Miloš is troubled in his relationship with his girlfriend Masha by a lapse of physical prowess at a crucial moment.

The station is a surprisingly sexualised environment -€“ the Station Master’€™s oilcloth covered couch has been ripped in several places during an illicit liaison and Dispatcher Hubička has used the station’€™s official stamps scandalously – to imprint the female telegraphist’€™s buttocks.

The feel of the passages dealing with these aspects of people’€™s lives is akin to magic realism but of course along with these there are always in the background the train movements, which the workers keep under close surveillance, to consider.

I know no Czech and consequently have not read the original so cannot say how true it was, but the translation read easily. A slight familiarity with German or Latin may occasionally help the reader with the few quotes from those languages which are included but the context makes most of them obvious and the important one is later rendered in English.

In Closely Observed Trains Hrabal has written a fine novella, an impressive work about how life carries on even in trying circumstances – and also an observation on the futility and arbitrariness of war.