[In the following review of The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and Cutting It Short, Vamos calls attention to Hrabal's joyous portrayal of everyday Czech life.]

If you want to be happy for a couple of hours, read the novels of Bohumil Hrabal. Novels? I'd better say fairy tales, realistic fairy tales that keep you smiling. In his novellas The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and Cutting It Short (the first title a sequel to the second), you actually get two fairy tales for the price of one—Hrabal promises us a good day.

I think most readers would agree that the history of twentieth-century literature is basically a story of unhappiness. Nearly every masterpiece is an account of the unbearable heaviness of being. Modern literature reminds me of old fathers who talk about their youth to their sons. Instead of happy stories, we get speeches about conflicts, hard work and insurmountable problems. The nice stories are usually told by old uncles who are not interested in our education—they just want to entertain.

In this century, the most influential “father writer” of Eastern European literature has been Franz Kafka. He is well known in Europe and America for his preoccupation with alienation, sorrow and loneliness—three gloomy themes that flit back and forth across the Atlantic like round-trippers on the Flying Dutchman. However, when considering Hrabal's heritage, it's more useful to see his happy fictions as descended from the works of Czech novelist Jaroslav Hasek. Hasek has been the most influential “uncle writer” of Eastern European literature. Hasek and Kafka were born the same year, 1883, and in the same city, Prague; Hasek died only one year before Kafka did, in 1923. Uncles may have less prestige, but they are more popular.

The eponymous hero of The Good Soldier Svejk by Hasek is a cunning Czech infantryman who pretends he is an idiot. Because he doesn't take anything seriously, he has a good time even in the tempest of World War I. He focuses on the most important things in life: drink, entertaining stories, food and dogs. And this amusing Uncle Hasek is the literary progenitor of Uncle Hrabal. Hrabal started his career as a writer very late. His first book, a collection of short stories, came out in 1963 when he was nearly 50. But he had been known in Czech (semi-underground) literary circles since the early 1950s. His writings could not swim through the net of censorship, so he read them aloud to his fans. That may surprise the American reader who smiled himself through I Served the King of England or Closely Watched Trains (the latter, filmed by Jiri Menzel, received an Academy Award in 1967 for Best Foreign Film).

Political statements or even hints are absent in those stories; simple and amusing anecdotes are tied together by an elemental style and by the narrator, who is usually the central character of the book. The censors were suspicious because Hrabal didn't care about politics. As Josef Skvorecky, another fine Czech writer, puts it in the introduction to Hrabal's new book, “The Stalinist mind does not possess the superstructure of the unconscious, but of pathological suspicion.” Hrabal won't say anything about socialism; he does not praise or condemn it. He respects those people who can keep their dignity, emotions and sense of humor in spite of their bad luck and the awful twists of history. Moreover, he suggests that there is virtually no relationship between happiness and a given political system, between a person's level of satisfaction and a government. For him, everyday life works by secret rules, and the more you study them, the less you understand. But Hrabal doesn't wish to understand; he just wants to admire.

Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still were written in the mid-seventies and published first abroad, appearing in Prague only after the collapse of the socialist system in 1989. Two radiant women, mother and daughter, are the charming narrators of these novellas. The mother's story in Cutting It Short takes place in the 1930s. The daughter, narrating the sequel, starts her story on the eve of World War II and ends at the beginning of the socialist dictatorship. But history itself is only a gray and distant cloud in the sky. The family lives in the wonderland of a brewery, somewhere in Czechland. Francin, loving husband in the first novella and aging father in the second, is the manager of the brewery. Uncle Pepin, the closest relative of Hasek's Svejk, the good soldier, came to visit his brother and stayed forever, working in the brewery. On his days off he proudly wears a white sailor cap and whiles the hours coming up with countless “true stories” about the years when he was an “Austrian sodger.” At the same time, he hopes to become a great opera singer one day.

Maryska, the radiant wife of Francin whose beauty is admired unanimously by the male populace, always follows her instincts. In one of the most extraordinary episodes, she goes to the hairdresser and has her famous long hair cut because everything has to be shorter. That's the “in” thing (and the explanation of the title). Another time, she takes off her skirt and cuts it short so that she might feel ten years younger. She then jumps on her bike and rides through the streets of the little town, where the sight of her bare knees causes shock and accidents. She proceeds to cut the tail of her little dog, and later, with the help of Uncle Pepin, shortens the legs of the dining table and its chairs. While they are busy sawing and listening to Uncle Pepin's amusing stories, they shorten one leg of the table by forty centimeters instead of four legs ten centimeters each. What can be done? Maryska piles huge historical novels under the missing leg, and that's that. Life is easy.

In the second novella, World War II sweeps over the town and the brewery. The manager is forced into retirement by the new socialist director. But family life never fades and every day is a wonder, even when Uncle Pepin dies in an old folks' home. He doesn't recognize his brother anymore, so Francin throws Uncle Pepin's cap into the air, and when it falls into the Elbe and is carried away, he feels that the memory of his brother and his cap will remain bright forever.

Hrabal builds his novels as if he were writing plays or screenplays. Each chapter is sewn around a few strong scenes, and these are the most important—the funniest—scenes of the narrator's life. The present two novellas flow into each other like rivers. (The English translation by James Naughton, incidentally, reads extremely well.) The two speakers, mother and daughter, talk about their lives in the same ecstatic style, and it is hard to tell them apart. But you don't want to anyway. You want to swim with the story, or rather fly from one scene to the next, like a butterfly—drunk from the Czech beer brewed in the little town where time stood still. Its location is hard to identify on the map. As Hrabal puts it in the poetic afterword: “Perhaps it won't any longer matter one bit if I haul the little town away on the trailer of the imagination about fifteen kilometers west, just to enable my heroes to reach the portals of the woods and let them enter as needed into any landscape or green abode.”

Men and women traveling on the trailer of Hrabal's imagination care for one another, and, what is more, always accept one another. Sooner or later every mistake is forgiven. “Grandpa, when something got on his wick, was dreadfully sensitive and touchy,” remembers the granddaughter, “but when he sobered up again, he was the nicest and kindest grandfather in the world, and he himself used to blame it all on race, declaring ‘The Slavs are a terribly sensitive race.’” (If you didn't suspect it before, you might from these novellas!) Francin, the father, suddenly becomes a wild beast when he is jealous of his wife or angry with his daughter—for instance, when she wants to have a tattoo of a little boat with an anchor. Unfortunately, she is deceived by the tattoo master and winds up with a naked mermaid on her chest. When Dad caught sight of it, he “ran about with the hammer, and being unable to kill me, he took out his watch, put it on the little anvil and with one blow shattered it to smithereens, the only way to save himself from smashing my head in instead of the watch.”

One can learn a great deal from Hrabal about the simple pleasures of life. I think everyone who reads the vivid description of the killing of Maryska's pigs feels an incredible hunger beginning to build. You could actually use this chapter as a manual for butchers and home cooks—unless you are afraid of so much cholesterol. Similarly, you learn a lot about the making of good beer. And about drinking it, too. “Drink more beer, make better cheer” is one of the slogans Francin comes up with to improve the sales figures of the brewery. But the real professor in the field of comparative beer studies is his wife:

I watched, and as always when I watch work with fire, I got thirsty, my tongue stuck to my palate and instead of saliva I had nothing in my mouth but the like of cigarette papers. I raised the measure and received a shock, the pot practically shot up in the air, I had thought it still heavy with beer, but it was altogether light, because I had already drunk it all. The foreman squatted down and took the measure from me and laughed and went into the conditioning cellar, I knew he would draw me my beer with one pull, put a good top on it, maybe fill half the can with lager and finish it with dark garnet, a mixture that sends your body purring all over with approval.

I have to finish this review right now and go to the kitchen to find out if we have some of that famous Czech beer because I am really thirsty, thanks to Uncle Hrabal. Milan Kundera called him the greatest living writer of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia doesn't exist anymore, but Hrabal is still the greatest. He'll be 80 next year.