[In the following review, Hustvedt provides a positive assessment of I Served the King of England, suggesting that it is Hrabal's best novel.]

Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England is not truly a forgotten book. It has been translated into many languages from its original Czech, including English, and was highly praised upon publication. And yet, traveling around this country last fall performing that grueling ritual known as the book tour, I discovered that the name of this wonderful writer meant nothing to the people in the bookstores where I read. In this sense, Hrabal must qualify as a writer who is not appreciated enough in the United States, and I Served the King of England (published in this country by Harcourt Brace) is his best book, a masterpiece of humor and poignancy, a book in which magic and reality overlap. Paul Wilson's translation is brilliant, a vivid reinvention of Hrabal's prose into English.

I Served the King of England is the story of Ditie. Not five feet tall, our hero is physically a runt, intellectually a midget, socially beneath his peers, and he spends years simply trying to raise himself to the level of the rest of the world. But little by little, his life exacts a change in him, and the transformation of Ditie is a beautiful thing to read. The book is also a parable of the little man in Europe, before, during, and after the Second World War. Ditie starts off as a busboy at the Golden Prague Hotel, where he first encounters the enchantments of money. Delicious food, beautiful women, and what he craves above all—respect—are available for a price. A sausage-slicing-machine salesman covers the floor of his hotel room with crown notes as Ditie watches, and the busboy's dream of riches takes focus. He moves up in the world and trains under a headwaiter with an uncanny ability to predict a guest's nationality, habits, and culinary preferences. Questioned about this gnostic gift, the man simply says: “I served the King of England.”

When the Hotel Paris throws a dinner party for Haile Selassie, Ditie waits on the emperor, who is so pleased with the little waiter's ministrations, he gives him a medal. Ditie's obsessive desire to prove he is equal to his superiors, coupled with his love for a Nazi girl, turns him into a collaborator during the war. But his attempts to hobnob with the Nazis fail. Like the bosses in the hotels where he once worked, the Germans snub him. When the tide of the war changes, he is delighted to find himself mistakenly imprisoned by the Nazis as a communist; he even welcomes a beating during an interrogation, because he understands that these misplaced blows may help land him on the winning side. Eventually, Ditie buys a hotel of his own, becomes a millionaire, and loses everything in the paroxysms of Czech society after the war. By the novel's end, he is living in the remote countryside with a horse, a goat, and a cat. Every day he repairs roads. Every evening he writes, and Ditie is happier than he has ever been.

Retelling the story, however, cannot begin to capture its strength. This is a novel in which the energy of the language and its repetitions work like an incantation on the reader. The sentences have a Gogolian extension to them, but unlike Gogol, Hrabal does not elaborate an idea through metaphors that become literal, but through associations linked by memory. One event generates another, and Hrabal allows each offshoot its own sublime growth. The boss of the Hotel Tichota is confined to a wheelchair:

He would be sitting there in his wheelchair and as usual something was making him uncomfortable, a rumpled blanket that needed smoothing out, so we would fasten a belt around his waist, like firemen have, with a ring on it. This was the same kind the miller Mr. Radimsky's two children used to wear when they played near the millrace with a Saint Bernard who lay on the point of land where the millrace rejoined the river, and whenever Hary or Vintír—those were their names—toddled toward the millrace, the Saint Bernard would get up, grab the ring in his mouth, and pull Hary or Vintír back out of danger. That's exactly what we did with the boss.

With this contraption, Ditie and a coworker haul the boss up and out of his chair until he dangles helplessly above their heads while they busy themselves with adjustments for his comfort. The speed of association mimics the leaps of thought. The images, however, resemble the distortions in dreams.

Hrabal pays homage to the writers who have influenced him. After the war, Ditie finds himself in the woods cutting down spruce trees that will be made into violins and cellos, and here in the sticks he is introduced to the French Surrealists by an exiled professor; together they read Robert Desnos, Alfred Jarry, and Ribemont-Dessaignes. The novel's imagery, like pictures in dreams, seems to come from the deepest human fears and wishes. A tailor has discovered a method to insure the perfect fit. He covers a client with rubber strips, which are then sewn together and blown up into a balloon. At his shop in Prague, these helium bodies float near the ceiling and Ditie looks up to see his own form mingling as an equal with generals and politicians and hotel owners. There is a democracy among these surrogate bodies that is not found on the ground.

The suspended boss, the airborne tailor's dummies; the Rabelaisian feast of the emperor of Ethiopia (which features roast camel stuffed with antelope, turkeys, fish, and eggs); Ditie's sexual adventures with prostitutes whose bodies he bedecks with flowers and spruce twigs; the brain-damaged boy he fathers with his Nazi wife, a child who does not speak but obsessively hammers nails into the floor—all these stories within the story reverberate as metaphors for spiritual and political life. This is not the material of realism, and yet these events are not miraculous either. The laws of nature don't break. They bend. The wife of a hotel owner picks up her drunken husband from the floor as if he were “an empty coat” and “tosses” him into the elevator where he “clatters” to the floor. The man is a thing, and the comedy that emerges resembles a pratfall in silent films.

In the beginning, the novel's slapstick carries an undercurrent of brutality. The camels for the Ethiopian feast are slaughtered on the hotel lawn. A lusty fight between rival Gypsy gangs leaves quarts of blood, bits of flesh, and a severed ear on the floor. As the story develops, the violence loses its buoyancy. The porter at the Hotel Tichota brutally tortures and kills the tomcat with whom his own cat has been dallying. Sadism is human, and given the opportunity, it spreads. Nazi doctors examine Ditie to verify that his small Slavic self may be wedded to Aryan purity. “And I knew from reading the papers that on the very same day that I was standing here with my penis in my hand to prove myself worthy to marry a German, Germans were executing Czechs, and so I couldn't get an erection and offer the doctor a few drops of my sperm.” Finally, Ditie releases the required specimen, and “with mighty thumping of rubber stamps,” the Bureau for the Defense of German Honor and Blood gives him a marriage license.

In this preposterous bureau, the surreal and the real collide, and the madness of history forces us to recognize that collision as truth. Had there been no Holocaust, the “examination” would have seemed as improbable as the tailor's balloons. In this book there is a refrain, and with each repetition, its meaning swells. With these words, Hrabal ends his book, which is also Ditie's book. This is the story, he writes, “of how the unbelievable came true.”