vii
Introduction
by Adam Thirlwell
(missing author)
by Adam Thirlwell
(missing author)
0
terms
3
notes
viii
[...] 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. [...]
i just like this phrase
[...] 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. [...]
i just like this phrase
viii
[...] 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.” [...]
jej
[...] 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.” [...]
jej
xxxii
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. [...]
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. [...]