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| "Two days on a bender and the cash gone..." |
There’s a term in Czech, coined to encapsulate Bohumil
Hrabal’s particular headlong rush through sentences and ideas, skipping over
syntax and playing with somewhat surreal juxtaposed ideas and images. In and of
itself it is a beautiful word – Hrabalovština.
According to Adam Thirlwell*, Hrabal preferred the term ‘palavering’ –
talking unnecessarily and at length, or prolonged and tedious fuss or
discussion. I suspect that’s just Hrabal’s way of dismissing his own work with
typical wry modesty. In another of his books, Dancing
Lessons For The Advanced In Age,
this palavering style is taken to the extreme, the author using digression and
repetition to basically write one novel-length sentence. Playful is my preferred
description, and in In-House Weddings,
volume one of three fictionalised biographies** of the writer, you come across multiple
digressive compound conjunctions where you’d expect some stronger punctuation and
the words simply tumble over each other, clause after clause raining down on you
like water over a weir, and you find yourself a little swept up in the flow,
interesting given the Doctor’s fascination with water – a little taste perhaps:
He ran down the steps again to the river and scooped handfuls of water and lashed them into his face, but even that didn’t do, he tugged off his shirt with his wet hands and splashed his chest all over with water, and when he came back up, he held the wet shirt in his wet hands and let water run down his waist and splatter and wet his pants.
The pedant in me is screaming, but the breathlessness of the
sentences is addictive. They swoop through emotions, Eliška smiling one second,
dizzy and nauseous the next, as when she goes to visit the Doctor at his paper
recycling operation and meets his colleague who describes the horrors of animal
transport because as a writer the Doctor needed to hear these things, the
horrors. When they walk along the rivers, she takes in the sweep up and down of
the landscape, amazed by the beauty of the things she never took the time to
notice, snapped back to the present by the Doctor rushing ahead, or skipping
down to the waters’ edge to splash himself, and cross that she decided to go
with him, only for the water in his eyelashes to bring her back to happiness. She
delights in the Doctor’s nostalgia for the places of his youth but is disgusted
by the ruinous present, seeming very upset by visiting the brewery in which he
worked but at which he could only see things as they were when he was there.
She empathises with a beautiful woman at the gate of his family home who sadly
congratulates them on their up-coming wedding, happy that she can cause such
sadness in another woman but recognising the sadness in herself, a melancholy
that almost drove her to suicide before she met the Doctor in his run-down
courtyard. The constant danger of death-by-falling-plaster which crashes down
into the courtyard from the crumbling walls is a comfort, a reminder of her
new-found happiness. The characters are typical European archetypes, although drawn
from real life and some real literary figures in places, and could be seen in
the films of Jiří Menzel and Emir Kusturica, especially the wise fool, into
which type Hrabal casts himself. Comedy and tragedy, gentle fun and genocide
are constant companions, and the London Review of Books say as much in the
review quoted on NU Press’
website:
Hrabal's comedy, then, is complexly paradoxical. Holding in balance limitless desire and limited satisfaction, it is both rebellious and fatalistic, restless and wise... It is a comedy of blockage, of displacement, entrapment, cancellation... Hrabal, in Freud's terms, is a great humorist. And a great writer.
In terms of his available works in English, I still much
prefer Too Loud A Solitude, and Closely Observed Trains but in this
really rather delightful novel are all of the seeds of the narratives from
both, clearly plucked from his own life experiences. I can’t think of another
writer whose books I enjoy on as many levels, and if only he’d travelled past his
Bohemian horizons, I’d be willing to bet his works would be as ubiquitous as those
of his more widely distributed European contemporaries.
*Miss
Herbert, Vintage, 2009
**The others being Gaps
and Vita
Nuova, both available from Northwestern University Press, for now at
least…
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