[In the following review, Boaz suggests that Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is “Rabelaisian,” calling attention to its playful use of vernacular storytelling.]

In this playful, Rabelaisian narrative [Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age] by the prominent Czech writer Hrabal (The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Pantheon, 1993), a shoemaker, as “sensitive as Mozart and an admirer of the European Renaissance,” unwinds a yarn about his life and loves for the benefit of the “beauties.” He is chivalrous, our narrator—his maxims for the proper life include the advice “not to live in a pigsty and keep the ladies supplied with flowers”—and he tells each story in one stuffed, seamless sentence that embraces the high and low of life, rabbit breeders and priests, soldiers and bakers, and Maria Teresa. Couching his text in the humble vernacular of our “engineer of human feet,” Hrabal inserts profound concerns about human nature and religion—the lost, great message of Jesus, “a champ, a muscleman handy with a horsewhip”; and the rampant evil that turns our narrator against marriage and having children of his own. Still, he concludes on the up and up: “the world is a beautiful place, don't you think? not because it is but because I see it that way.” For daring literature collections.