The edition includes three of Bohumil Hrabal's most significant works: "I Served the King of England", "Too Loud a Solitude" and "Closely Watched Trains" - unique artistic worlds, providing exquisite delight to connoisseurs of quality European prose.
I Served the King of England is a novel by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. The story is set in Prague in the 1940s, during the Nazi occupation and early communism, and follows a young man who alternately gets into trouble and has successes. Hrabal wrote the book during a period of censorship in the early 1970s. It began circulating in 1971, and was formally published in 1983. It was adapted into a 2006 film with the same title, directed by Jiří Menzel, a noted director of the Czech New Wave.
Too Loud a Solitude is a short novel by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. It was self-published in samizdat in 1976 and officially in Czechoslovakia in 1989 due to political censorship. It tells the story of an old man who works as a paper crusher in Prague, using his job to save and amass astounding numbers of rare and banned books; he is an obsessive collector of knowledge during an era of censorship.
Hrabal's postwar classic „Closely Watched Trains“ about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most popular works. Milos Hrma is a timid railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. After receiving acclaim as a novel, Closely Watched Trains was made into a successful film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1967.
Czech novelist and short story writer, whose tales show the influence of Surrealism, Dada, and psychoanalysis. Bohumil Hrabal gained international fame with Closely Watched Trains (1965), set in German occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II. The novel was also made into a highly successful film. Hrabal's writings were banned after the Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Bohumil Hrabal was born near Brno, but his childhood Hrabal spent in Nymburk, where his step-father worked as a brewery manager. Just before the World War II, Hrabal entered Charles University, Prague. In 1937 his first printed work Prsi (it’s raining) was published in Nymburk newspapers. After the Nazis closed the universities, he took up various jobs, including a dispatcher in a small railway station and an assistent in a small law firm in Nymburk in 1939-1940. In 1946 Hrabal received his law degree, but he never practiced. Instead he tried a wide variety of occupations - he worked as a commercial and insurance agent, a steelworker in Kladno foundries, a handler of waste paper, and a stagehand in a Prague theater. These experiences provided him much material for his tales and anecdotes.
Hrabal established himself relatively late as writer, at the age of 49, although he had started to write poetry in the 1940s. Later he focused on prose text and novellas. From the early period dates Ztracena ulicka (a lost alley), his scheduled literary debut, which eventually was printed in 1991. Hrabal's first book of short stories, Perlicka na dne (a little pearl at the bottom), was not published until 1963. At that time the Czechoslovak communist regime moved toward more liberal policy. From Surrealists, he adopted the technique of "automatic writing", which especially marked his works from the 1970s. His works also show the influence of James Joyce and his stream-of-consciousness style.
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