Mr Kafka and Other Tales by Bohumil Hrabal

If you weren't surrounded
by a little cloud, you'd
make beautiful things.

As odd as it sounds, Bohumil Hrabal will forever remind me of a Viz comic strip, entitled “Deathbed Chortles with Bob Hope”. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this before in these pages – please feel free to contradict me, crawler bots – but here is the reason why. It was stated by official sources that Hrabal often fed the pigeons on the windowsill next to his hospital bed, which was on a ward on the 5th floor of the hospital where he was either convalescing or whiling away his final hours. Through this window, he “slipped” and fell to his death a little shy of his 83rd birthday. The pigeons were very likely an embellishment to disguise his almost certain suicide, as corroborated by both his friends and professionals at the hospital. As deeply saddening as it is to consider him taking his own life, it lends a certain tragicomic desperation to the hurried covering up of his death by those with a vested interest in his ongoing censorship – the remnants of the very Cult referenced in the subtitle of the international edition of this book. Bob Hope, in the comic strip, spends his final days carefully whetting his parting words with a team of scriptwriters to razor-sharp comic genius, only to accidentally fall out of a window to his death swearing crassly, much to amusement of the tabloids whose reports feature his disappointing lack of wit in the circumstances.

The joke loses some of its impact in the retelling, but I promise, it made me snort coffee out of my nose.

But it is equally odd to say that Hrabal’s collection of inter-related short stories* has profound moments of such humour, some dark, some crass, some whimsical, amid the melancholy and oppressive drudgery of Stalinist Czechoslovakia. One of the main features of this period of his writing is that he is moving away from the poetry of his early, pre-publication years, and a tendency for surrealism, and towards something he was to call “total realism”, where the focus on finding infinitesimal pleasures in the overwhelmingly grey concrete reality of post-war Prague leads to a close observation of how the people around him react to the mechanisms of an oppressive state. Ironically, perhaps, this leaves the impression that there is as much surreal magic in closely observed mundanity as in the work of the French Surrealists who inspired him to write. There are very few dissidents, very few agitators for change – Hrabal himself has never been recognised or been treated as a dissenting voice and indeed has faced criticism that he wasn’t more rebellious – but plenty of sighing resignation, a strikingly human ability to make the best of a bad situation. Hrabal’s characters, people who are forced to volunteer in the steelworks – if you don’t know anything about Czech history, the Poldi steelworks where most of this collection is set still exists, and was where lawyers and judges, prisoners and prostitutes, were all sent to work to the greater glory of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (thanks for the context go to Paul Wilson and his notes on translation!) – attempt to find ways of retaining their humanity: a group of male prisoners gather to spy on a beautiful woman guilty of murder as she knowingly undresses and bathes for their pleasure; a man climbs a wall to watch as a classical ensemble and a brass band, and their audience, come to blows; a judge claims, tragically, that his life is much better now it is simplified in the steelworks, and takes his pleasure in burning pieces of fine wood he finds. And people try to find ways to insulate themselves from the barbarity: a guard believes his care of women prisoners redeems him in the eyes of God; a philosopher’s belief that the nobility of human struggle protects a woman from the horror and indignity of gang-rape. There is bald comedic japery too, with a group of entertainingly recalcitrant and mischievous grinders who get up to some excellent shithousery when a propaganda film crew arrives to capture the joy and camaraderie of the noble volunteer workforce. 

I have immense love and respect for Hrabal and his work, and I have just found out – gasp! – that there are more works as yet unread but now translated into English, ready for me to enjoy. As a true great of Middle European literature he is deserving of a wider readership and I would be delighted to think I had turned just one eye towards his work.

*Please assume the usual disclaimer around my feelings towards the shorter form.

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