Overview

"In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) between 1989 and 1991 but never sent, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) chronicles the momentous events of those years as seen, more often than not, from the windows of his favorite pubs. In his palavering, stream-of-conscious style that has marked him as one of the major writers and innovators of postwar European literature, Hrabal gives a humorous and at times moving account of life in Prague under Nazi occupation, Communism, and the brief euphoria following the revolution of 1989 when anything seemed possible, even pink tanks. Interspersed are fragmented memories of trips taken to Britain - as he attempted to track down every location mentioned in Eliot's ""The Waste Land"" - and the United States, where he ends up in one of Dylan Thomas's haunts comparing the waitresses to ones he knew in Prague. The result is a masterful blend of personal history and fee association rendered in a prose as powerful as it is poetic.."

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9788090217195

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Bohumil Hrabal at his most ecstatic, in the sense of almost religious fervor, full of the mystic vision of Eastern European writers. They are his dark night of the soul, his Wasteland. Written from 1989 to 1992 (when Hrabal was 75), they are the sum of his fear and his shame. Los Angeles Times

Bohumil Hrabal at his most ecstatic, in the sense of almost religious fervor, full of the mystic vision of Eastern European writers. They are his dark night of the soul, his Wasteland. Written from 1989 to 1992 (when Hrabal was 75), they are the sum of his fear and his shame. - Los Angeles Times In Total Fears, Hrabal glancingly commends Freud's writing about comedy and jokes, and calls it typically Central European, and especially typical of Prague. [...] This is blocked humour about blocked people. Hrabal, in Freud's terms, is a great humorist. - London Review of Books The publication of this book marks a major event ... As an addition to English Hrabalia, Total Fears is invaluable, and unlikely to be matched for some time. - The Prague Post

Author Information

"Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his ""hyper-realist"" texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the postwar period. James Naughton was Professor of Czech Language and Literature at Oxford University until his death in 2014. His translations of Czech literature included Bohumil Hrabal's The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and The Jingle Bell Principle by Miroslav Holub."

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