Bohumil Hrabal, one of Czechoslovakia's most acclaimed writers, is perhaps best known to American readers as the author of Closely Watched Trains, a novel that, in 1967, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. More political in theme than many of Hrabal's other works of fiction, the story concerns a young man in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who is killed when he attempts to blow up a German ammunition train. In Hrabal's other tales, although he alludes to political events in Czechoslovakia, he is more interested in exploring the ways in which ordinary people perceive reality and create their own imaginary worlds.

Not until 1989 was Hrabal's fiction available in English translation: first If I Served the King of England, a lighthearted tale of the adventures of a busboy who eventually becomes a successful hotel owner, then Too Loud a Solitude, the fictional memoir of a trash collector who rescues books from destruction. In both works, serious themes underlie humorous, sometimes absurd, episodes in the lives of irrepressible characters. Hrabal's language is earthy and direct, his images vivid and intense, and always evident is his engagement with readers and his love of writing. “My literature and my texts are nothing other than my own remembrance of things past,” he wrote in an unpublished autobiography; “the search overwhelms me, but at the same time, it amuses me; in my texts, I put much emphasis on entertainment, on how entertained I am by the difficulty of this quest.”

When Hrabal draws upon his memories, he mines a wide range of experiences. His college education was interrupted by the Second World War, when Czechoslovakian universities were shut down during the Nazi occupation. Hrabal spent the war years working as a law clerk, insurance agent, and traveling salesman. After the war, he finished his studies and went on to earn a law degree. But he discovered that the degree was useless under the new communist government. Instead, he worked in a steel mill, a paper-recycling plant, and as a stagehand in a Prague theater. These occupations both supported him and fueled his fiction with a variety of quirky characters.

Like many writers in Eastern Europe, Hrabal had more difficulty publishing his works than writing them. Although many of his poems and stories date from the 1930s, the political climate did not permit him to publish for about twenty years. Even then, in the 1950s, his work was distributed in secret by underground presses and read privately among his fellow writers. In the 1960s, a new atmosphere of liberalism in Czechoslovakia allowed him to publish several novels, including Closely Watched Trains; these publications and the critical acclaim they generated established Hrabal as a novelist of the first rank. Nevertheless, in 1968, when the Soviet army crushed Prague, Hrabal again found himself a banned writer. The two novellas included in The Little Town Where Time Stood Still—the title story and Cutting It Short—date from this period.

Although mired in political upheaval, Hrabal preferred to write about human concerns that transcend governments and their ideologies. This intent served him well: In the mid-1970s, when he was interviewed about his writing by Tvorba, an official communist journal in Prague, he focused on the themes that interested him rather than on endorsing or rejecting communist ideology. Despite his history as a banned writer, on the basis of the interview the government decided that Hrabal did not pose a threat and lifted censorship of his works. In the late 1970s and early '80s, a period of severe cultural repression, Hrabal was one of only a few writers who were able to publish. Hrabal comments on this censorship in Too Loud a Solitude:

How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn't have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain.

THE HAIRCUT

Cutting It Short, originally published in 1976, is the story of Maryska, a lively and irreverent young woman who lives in a rural Czech village in the 1930s with her staid husband, Francin, and his brother, Uncle Pepin, who is just as wild as she. Maryska's most admirable feature is her long golden hair, gleaming tresses that turn men's heads and stop traffic when she rides along the lanes on her bicycle. Maryska is justly proud of her wonderful hair, but one day she realizes that long hair—and many other traditions of her life—are soon to be a thing of the past.

One day, when Maryska is in the village, the owner of the draper's shop gathers a crowd by demonstrating “an amenity [that] can enable us to hear news not only from Prague, but maybe Brno too, music maybe even from Pilsen, and, to cast modesty completely to the winds, even news and music all the way from Vienna!” The invention, of course, is a radio, and Maryska quickly recognizes how it will change her life.

I hurried my bicycle home the minute I heard that foreshortened distance through the earphone between the brass-band music in Prague and my listening ear in the Hotel Na Knizeci. I took off my skirt, laid it on the table, picked up the scissors, and at the point where the knees come in the skirt, I cut short the material. … Ten years younger I was for that foreshortening of distances.

The radio excites Maryska's imagination, and she decides that she must cut her hair—and shorten the tail of her dog, too, bribing him with cream puffs while she does so. The villagers are shocked at her mutilating the dog but not as shocked as when they notice her short hair. “What have you done with that beautiful hair! How could you!” exclaims one woman. “And now I knew,” reflects Maryska, “that my hair belonged to [the village's] historical monuments.” As Maryska cycles to Francin's office, she is spat upon by some bicyclists and scorned by the self-righteous members of a women's welcoming committee. When Francin sees her, he is speechless. Exerting his authority as her husband and a guardian of past traditions, he spanks her with the inner tube of one of her bicycle tires. “And Francin whipped me and the cyclists nodded in contentment and the three lady members of the amenity society watched me as if they had ordered this rendering of satisfaction.” But Maryska's spirits are not dampened even by her husband's outburst. Undaunted, she sails with optimism into a world that promises adventure, speed, and freedom.

LOST TIMES

Of course, as Hrabal knew when he wrote Cutting It Short, life in Czechoslovakia after the 1930s would be anything but unfettered. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still pays homage to the past that was undone by the Second World War and its aftermath. This novella, Hrabal tells us, recalls “that which I dream about most intensely and hence most happily.”

The story focuses again on Francin, the steady and responsible brother, and Uncle Pepin, gregarious and funny, a spendthrift who runs off with his “pretties” and spends his salary on drink and pleasure. Hrabal portrays a gentle life of country fairs, festive balls, horse rides, masquerades, processions on religious holidays. Each evening, the villagers promenade through dusky streets and lovers make a detour along the river or through the woods. In summer, political parties sponsor outings with “tombolas and jailhouses and shooting booths.” The village's rich cultural life supports five theaters, a symphony orchestra, and a choir.

Life is predictable, but the very predictability gives townspeople a feeling of cohesiveness. They know that in summer, at four in the afternoon, there are exercises at the athletic academy. In winter, also at four, black pudding and sausages are delivered to the pubs, where card players stop playing and buy two sausages and a roll. They know the songs that the carpenters sing as they work; they know the melodies that tinkle from the music boxes. They know one another.

But gradually the gentle routine is shattered. Francin and Uncle Pepin, survivors of the past, cannot recognize that “the old time had stopped just like Sleeping Beauty eating a poisoned apple, and the Prince didn't come, couldn't even come. …” The new time was an “era of great posters and great meetings, at which fists were shaken against everything that was old, and those who were living by the old time were at home, living quietly on memory.”

Hrabal regrets the loss of that time, and he writes to preserve his memories. For Czech readers, Hrabal's books might serve the same purpose as a family album, reminding them of the context in which their parents and grandparents lived. But for American readers, a volume such as The Little Town Where Time Stood Still introduces a world that is not only past but distinctly foreign.

In Cutting It Short, for example, Hrabal treats us to a long chapter on the slaughter of a pig, surely an experience that not many readers will remember, however distantly. Hrabal allows us to consider not only the butcher's skill but also the place of the ritual within the community. The butcher and his neighbors share white coffee and marble cake, and of course a drink of rum, as they harvest every bit of the pig, from snout to tail, for meat, blood pudding, and sausages. What might be a gory, violent scene in the hands of another writer becomes an elegy. For Hrabal, “Nothing is so passionate in colouring as the dark brown colour of liver, adorned with the emerald of gall, like clouds before the storm, just like tender cloud fleeces, there running alongside the guts is the knobbly leaf fat, yellow as a “uttered candle, as beeswax.”

Perhaps this passage conveys a sense of Hrabal's prose: rich, redolent, dense with images of nature. His language, according to some Czech readers, is untranslatable, evoking connotations and references that only a Czech speaker could understand. But James Naughton, in this translation, seems to have caught Uncle Pepin's earthy banter, Maryska's childlike responses, and Hrabal's sly wit. Whatever is lost in translation, it is not the warmth and passion that inform Hrabal's work.