[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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 still in place to stimulate a critical, mocking turn of mind.” [...]

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 joyfulness, their reworking of the usual art of the novel, are portable. His narrators are haunting, and this haunting, I think, is because the avant-garde veering and careering of the technique is so sadly and comically embedded in a true and lovable character, so that the reader is caught between a clinical detachment and an anguished empathy. Because there is no real need to know, as Hrabal tells his wife in In-House Weddings, without mentioning Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age: “I was a champion at polka and waltz, I won a prize in the mature/advanced category, you know, I completed two levels of dance, wanted to be the number one of the dance.”[32] No, there is really no need to know the depth of Hrabal’s self-exposure in his narrators, how far he identified with these painfully vulnerable fantasists. And so I write this and wonder if something analogous, from the modern world of Los Angeles, would be the sadness that leaks from Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid fantasists, trapped in their noirish plots and counterplots; or the melancholy films of David Lynch, where the fragmentation of the narrative is countered by the helpless tenderness of his characters.

Yes, Hrabal’s fiction is portable: his irony is a necessary instrument. For after all, the truth about man is by nature ironical, wrote Thomas Mann in his essay on Chekhov. And he was right: this irony is universal. Not even death is preserved from the history of mistakes. [...]

[...] when I was serving in the most elegant army in the world I told our medical officer, Doctor, I said, I’ve got a weak heart, but all he said was, So have I, boy, and if we had a hundred thousand like you we could conquer the world, and he put me into the highest category [...]

[...] Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you’d forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your handkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out [...]

[...] which is why Batista’s book on sexual hygiene warns men against giving in to their passions, no more than three times an afternoon or four times for Catholics, to prevent sinful thoughts from taking shape, you never know where they might lead, they get into your blood, sultans are particularly susceptible and always come to grief, sometimes even popes and kings have their problems and it’s all over before you know it, a kingdom on its head over a beautiful woman [...]

[...] poor Pushkin, to die in a duel, and so young, his last poems gushing from the bullet hole in his head [...]

[...] Listen, everybody, not only people who aren’t with us are with us, no, even people who are against us are with us, because you can’t cut yourself off from your times, there you have it, ladies, now you see why poets love to drink and meditate, and just when things are looking grim the heavens open up and out comes a thought making its way to the light [...]

[...] Mr. Haňka knelt and begged the bees to stop, he had a wife and children, but they stung him all over, even his private parts, which swelled up to the size of a watering can [...]

[...] one day when we were practicing Parade rechts and Parade links and single combat with fixed bayonets, so we got into position and I lunged then and there and pow! whacked him on the chin with my bayonet, which had this little ball on the end of it, and he did a backward somersault and had to be given artificial respiration by the Bosnians, You could have killed him, the lieutenants yelled at me, but I said, He asked me to be his enemy, but the lieutenants said, You should have done Parade rechts and Parade links first and only then gone into the einfacher Stoss, but I said, Really now, you don’t expect me to do Parade rechts and Parade links with my enemy! of course I went straight to the einfacher Stoss, that was what made me a hero [...]