The Little Town Where Time Stood Still by Bohumil Hrabal

Once a quarter Uncle Pepin
got in a revolutionary mood...

Having finished within days of each other the two svelte novels Closely Observed Trains and Too Loud A Solitude, two novels which take up positions one and two on my list of favourite European novels of all time, I quickly resolved to pepper the next few months with more Hrabalobština and I purchased with intent to binge I Served The King Of England (superb!), Dancing Lessons For The Advanced in Age, and In-House Weddings, along with this double-header of stand-alone but linked novellas. For whatever reason, twelve years passed between the first of this short list and this last book.

Twelve years!

I find it difficult to describe, but much like when I think about the mid-Western novels of Percival Everett, or more recently the two Laird Hunt books Indiana, Indiana and Kind One, I experience a creeping horror and fascination born of a complete disconnect between myself and the characters of the novel, and am subject to a squally sense of pathos which can at any moment send my mood off into a cyclonic depression and threaten heavy showers of self-pitying tears*.

Once you get past the crashing of sentence into sentence without pause and pick up the subtle flow of Hrabal's oratory style, you're treated to rare scenes of tragedy and comedy, restrained desire and passion, and dark shame, all underpinned by a superb and surreal sense of the inherent hilarity of humanity. Here, a local beauty, enraptured by her own fresh vibrancy and worshipped by the men of the town for her nebulous galaxy of shimmering hair, is swept up by the fashion for cutting things short, after the display at a local hotel of a radio playing Kmoch's Kolín Brass Band live all the way from Prague, and the demonstrator commenting that it cut short the distance between the capital and the countryside. She rushes away and instructs the local barber to cut off her hair, flies home to shorten the table legs and rather brutally chops off the end of her dog's tail. Meanwhile her husband's brother, Uncle Pepin arrives for a short stay which turns into the rest of his life.

This is followed up by the tale of the two brothers as they less-than-peaceably co-exist as brothers and as employer-employee at the local cooperatively run brewery. Pepin is loud, filled with unlikely braggadocio, working with and entertaining the other men in the brewery and courting the ladies of service in his sailors cap, while Francin, married to the beauty Maryska, who had scandalized the town by the act of shortening her admired tresses, hand on the tiller of the brewery until replaced by a representative of the working people once the Germans have left, anxiously and obsessively de- and re-constructs his ancient motorbike all the while mortified by the actions of his brother, who came for a few days and stays until he dies.

Both novels host a panoply of curious characters, a delightful and broad rendering of life in a town where time stands still, and Hrabal's style is to mix the horror and tenderness of life with deft wit and a sense of wonder, while tempering the mystical with a generous dose of skepticism and, no doubt, a flavouring of his own morbid fascination with his own mortality; in the afterword, he explains about having his photo taken in the cemetery as he slowly sinks into a grave, following a short illness he expects to be his last. 

I love it, and it leaves me alternately weepy and giggly. It's like wallowing in comic self-pity. Like I say, it's hard to explain the effect on me, but like all good (great!) European novels set in the inter-war years, it has to cope with and deliver so much that the reader, i.e. me, can't help but feel overwhelmed, in a good (great!) way. It is superb.

*Mostly likely during spells of loneliness and heavy drinking, each a symptom of the other.

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