[In the following excerpt from a review of several Central and Eastern European authors' works, Miron lauds Hrabal's portrayal of World War II-era Czechoslovakia in The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and compliments its translation by James Naughton.]

In Tolstoy's world, no two unhappy families are alike. The same might be said of modern Eastern European writers, each scarred differently from a similar juncture of historical time and geographic space. Yet most have been determined, despite the banning and censorship of their work, and at risk of imprisonment or exile, to “tell the truth” about their epoch as they knew it. “A heavy biography,” as the exiled Romanian writer Norman Manea puts it, pithily describes many of their lives.

One soon realizes that little of the recent literature which has emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain arrives here without a complicated publication history. Yet lacking a sleuth's wits, it's often difficult to find out much about these writers' histories and the draconian measures they took to insure their work would appear in print, even in a samizdat edition. It's puzzling, too, that although several of the books discussed here were bestsellers in Europe, the reputations they've achieved abroad have had a negligible effect on their cachet here. None has achieved the fame, captured the reading public's attention, or caused the commotion and notoriety that variously greeted them in their native lands or native languages. …

The action, or pronounced lack of it, in the two novellas of Bohumil Hrabal's The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, takes place in a sleepy Czech village just before and shortly after World War II, encompassing but only obliquely alluding to the horrors suffered under the rule of the Gestapo, and later, of Communism. Hrabal (b. 1914), who began to devote himself fully to his writing only in 1962, has an exotic résumé even by Eastern European standards. He completed his studies at Prague's Charles University with a doctorate in law, but found it impossible to practice under the German occupation after 1939. (One Czech critic remarked, “The only bar that the law school graduate Hrabal ever came close to was the one in any number of Prague's pubs,” where he is tremendously popular). A jack-of-all-trades who has worked as a traveling salesman, notary's clerk, postman, dealer in scrap paper, stagehand, and steelworker, Hrabal went unpublished until 1956, when Jiri Kolar issued a semi-legal, not-for-sale Bibliophile Club edition of two of Hrabal's stories. Hrabal soon became a literary star, deemed a national hero, a revolutionary of prose, a writer of the people.

Following the Soviet invasion of 1968 the secret police ruthlessly harassed Hrabal for having supported Alexander Dubcek. After a prolonged period of hospitalization, his nerves totally frayed, Hrabal publicly declared his support for a never-defined notion of “socialism,” and signed the “Anti-Charter,” forced upon him by the Czechoslovak regime in retaliation for the publication of Charter 77, signed by most of his friends. This permitted Hrabal to publish “officially,” though his novels remained “subversive,” thus censored “preventatively” or radically disfigured by “editorial” changes. His works, which include the popular Closely Watched Trains, Too Loud a Solitude, and I Served the King of England, would hence appear in Czechoslovakia in two guises—complete but clandestine in samizdat and expurgated but sanctioned in another.

Hrabal has always been attracted to people who have suffered but endured upheavals and to times of postwar confusion. The Little Town, a dirge for pre-communist times written in 1973, is no exception. Twice published abroad in emigré editions, it didn't appear in Prague restored to its entirety until after the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

“I don't actually write,” Hrabal has claimed in interviews. “I cut, and then glue the cut-outs together into collages,” montages composed of scraps of reality, dreams, and flights of surrealist fantasy. The joint heroines of the collage-like Cutting It Short (the first novella) are the irrepressible, sensuous Maryska and her glorious flowing hair, to which Hrabal devotes pages of rapturous description. Maryska's fragrant hair, “a hark back to the golden days of yore,” enchants all who come into contact with her and her mane, “as if I was part of a Catholic rite, as if my hair was part of some feast of the church,” she boasts. Her husband Francin, manager of the local brewery, adores Maryska for her tresses, which, in her words, “spread out and enveloped me like music” and “glittered and shone like a papal banner.”

But Francin loves his impulsive and flamboyant wife best when she pretends to be an ailing dependent, “a nice decent woman sitting at home,” a role ill-suited to this sybarite who gorges on cherries and tries to keep up with the latest fashion by shortening not only her skirts—scandal enough!—but also her dog's tail, the legs of a table, and finally her own illustrious hair. Francin's anger and grief over Maryska's rebellious haircut, which all but shatters his insular world, gives some inkling of how ill-prepared he and his Czech neighbors are for the seismic eruptions soon to reshape their sleepy little town.

The second novella, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, narrated by Maryska and Francin's son, opens eight years later, with German and Russian soldiers still in Czechoslovakia, and Communism—which really makes time stand still—on its way. “Everything linked with the old era had fallen anti-clockwise into a slumber.” The family—including Uncle Pepin with his “lovely ladies, dances and sprees,” who came for a fortnight visit but stays until his piteous death years later, and his motorbike-loving brother Francin who loses his job when his brewery is nationalized—weather the assaults of history, aging, and decline into physical and spiritual decrepitude. Yet through it all there is Hrabal's gift for bittersweet irony and mordant satire, his Swecz-like photographic hyper-sensitivity to nature's marvels, and his ribald humor. Considered both the most quintessentially “Czech” and most poetic of Czech writers—hence resistant to translation—Hrabal is blessed to have had James Naughton as translator of this book.