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In the twentieth century, as Hrabal described it, Central Europe was a “literary laboratory.” But the moral paradoxes examined in this laboratory are not only Central European, or of the twentieth century. No, the questions are global, and permanent. And so Hrabal’s fictions, with their intent sad …

[...] The novel was published in Prague in 1964, when Hrabal was fifty. “Ah, those beloved Sixties,” remembered Milan Kundera, “at the time I liked to say cynically: the ideal political regime is a crumbling dictatorship; the machinery of oppression functions ever more incompetently, but it is stil…

[...] And if this series of real and imaginary lives is shuffled together, what emerges is a composite portrait: a narrator saddened by history, who refuses to accept that life is fate. [...]

They tried to get away from Sfax, from its dreary streets and emptiness, so as to find vistas, sights and ruins which perhaps would dazzle or bowl them over, some glowing marvel which would even the score. The remains of a palace, or a temple, or an amphitheatre, a verdant oasis seen from a peak ne…

You have learnt nothing, except that solitude teaches you nothing, except that indifference teaches you nothing: it was a lure, it was a mesmerising illusion which concealed a pitfall. You were alone and that is all there is to it and you wanted to protect yourself; you wanted to burn the bridges b…