A short life of the author
Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) was born on 28 March 1914 in Brno-Židenice, Moravia. He studied law at Charles University in Prague but never practised. He worked in a steel mill, as a travelling salesman, as a railroad dispatcher, as a stagehand, and — most significantly for his fiction — as a compactor of waste paper in a recycling centre. He did not publish a book until he was nearly fifty.
Life and Career
Hrabal’s late start — his first published collection, A Pearl at the Bottom (Perlička na dně), appeared in 1963 — was partly a matter of temperament and partly a consequence of the Communist regime’s censorship. Much of his best work circulated in samizdat or was published only abroad.
Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1965) — about a young railway dispatcher during the German occupation — was adapted by Jiří Menzel into the 1966 film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, written 1971, published officially 1989) — about a diminutive waiter who rises through Czech society by serving the powerful — is his most ambitious novel: picaresque, comic, and suffused with the catastrophes of twentieth-century Czech history.
Too Loud a Solitude (Příliš hlučná samota, 1976) — about Haňťa, a man who has spent thirty-five years compacting waste paper and rescuing books from destruction — is his most personal and philosophically profound work, a love letter to books and reading written by a man who had himself worked in a paper-compacting cellar.
Major Works and Themes
Hrabal’s great gift is his narrative voice — garrulous, digressive, comic, philosophical, rooted in the oral tradition of Czech pub storytelling. His characters are ordinary people — waiters, dispatchers, factory workers — whose inner lives are rich with feeling and thought. He writes about the persistence of beauty and meaning in a world of political violence and historical catastrophe.
Key Works
- Closely Watched Trains (1965)
- I Served the King of England (1971/1989)
- Too Loud a Solitude (1976)
Collecting Hrabal
Czech first editions (Československý spisovatel) are the primary collected form. English translations — Closely Watched Trains (1968, Jonathan Cape/Grove Press), Too Loud a Solitude (1990, Harcourt) — bring $20–$80. Hrabal died in 1997 after falling from a hospital window while reportedly feeding pigeons.