Chester returned to New York, where he became one of the foremost critics of the ’60s, writing witty, scabrous reviews for The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and Commentary
His best novel, Histoire de l’œil (Story of the Eye), today a classic of obscure symbolism and underage sex, was published in 1928 and peremptorily banned
Socialist Realist fiction was too obviously occupied with schematic surface: A man is discharged from the Red Army a hero and returns to reorganize his hometown around a hyperprogressive cement factory (the novel Cement by Fyodor Gladkov). It was all exterior, a series of events or plot points demo…
Innumerable poems, stories, and shoddy ad campaigns have fantasized that the river running through Prague, the Vltava—the Moldau in German—is a river of beer. On one bank is the city’s administrative center; on the other, the nation’s—the Castle, apostrophized by another son, Franz Kafka. Prague is…
Hrabal suggested another word for his works: pábení, Englished by the writer Josef Škvorecký as “palavering,” meaning “idle chatter” or “flattering babble,” here intended to characterize looping, loopy conversation
