Bohumil Hrabal: A Conversation Between Infinity and Eternity

In a collective BookGang misstep, rather than meet at the thematically appropriate Czech Beer Garden in Queens or Brooklyn's beerhall equivalent, Radegast, we convened at Rose's Live Music to discuss I Served the King of England, a novel by the late Bohumil Hrabal, Czech author and pub enthusiast. (With four of us gangsters having traveled to Prague, how'd we get the location so wrong?) As a consequence, we spent the first fifteen minutes critiquing Rose's service, rather than the book. Ironic, given much of the novel's plot involves restaurant service (the title refers to an oft-uttered line by a masterful maitre d').

The protagonist is Ditie, a very short and rather simple character who at the start the book sells weiners for the Golden Prague Hotel, all the while pining for wealth and recognition. The first three-quarters of the book read as hilarious picaresque, as Ditie bounces from one Hotel to another, accruing wealth and a kind of wordly wisdom (and romantic encounters). As our fool kicks around different hotels, he finds himself in the company of eccentric salesmen and poets, hoteliers and politicans - including the President and the Emperor of Ethiopia. The emperor's meal makes a dish like turducken seem sane and humble by comparison. But it's not all laughs: Ditie delivers passages of sheer poetic beauty, as when when he recalls living with his grandmother in a mill, just below a bathhouse frequented by traveling salesmen. The salesmen would often check their old underclothes out the bathouse window. He and his grandmother would wait for these moments; she, to mend the shirts; he, to bask in the unlikely aesthetic beauty that transforms this otherwise mundane moment into one of grace:

"Sometimes shirts that got trhown out would suddenly spread their arms like a traffic cop at an intersection, or like Christ, and the shirts would be crucified in midair for a moment, and then plunge headlong onto the rim or blades of the mill wheel... it was wonderful to see white underwear suddenly fly out of the bathroom window in the Charles Baths and flutter down through the darkness, a white shirt against the black abyss of the current, flashing for an instant outside our window, and float down into the depths to land on the gleaming wet blades."

The above image foreshadows the eloquent spiritual lens through which Ditie sees the world in the last third of the book. By that time, has gained and lost his own hotel and fortune, gained and lost a wife and child, and retreated into the remote countryside where he mends roads. His only company at this point are a dog, horse, goat and cat; a strange work crew, but hardly his wildest. Ditie has relinquished his ambitions and now dispenses his distilled wisdom over Urqells at the backwater village where he buys supplies.

"...whenever I was in the pub I realized that the basic thing in life is questioning death, wanting to know how we'll act when our time comes, and that death, or rather this questioning of death, is a conversation that takes place between infinity and eternity, and how we deal with our own death is the beginning of what is beautiful, because the absurd things in our lives, which always end before we want them to anyway, fill us, when we contemplate death, with bitterness and therefore with beauty."

And of beauty? "Beauty always points to infinity and eternity."

Dittie's abstract musings contrast sharply against his earlier revelations, like the joys to be found in Paradise, the brothel he frequents as a teenager, just as his voluntary withdrawal into the barren countryside differs from the warmth and human noise of the novel's earlier scenes. (Which, by the way, are hilarious.) The chill and solitude Ditie embraces makes for good discussion, but they also come at a price, for readers anyway: the isolated philosophizing creates narrative drag and, as if to compensate for the freeze on action, Hrabal keeps pointing out various ways in which "the unbelievable came true" - which reads a bit thin, compared the incredible (and incredibly) numerous memorable events that give the young Ditie his formative experience and make the novel one worthy of our highest praise.

-Jason Watt

James Wood, staff writer at the New Yorker and a fine, fine critic, has more to say about the book and its author here.

Next: We'll be reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the Pevear / Volokhonsky translation. We'll discuss parts 1-4 on Sunday, December 14th, and parts 4-8 sometime in January. Times and Places TBD.

Kundera rats out a spy, media assassinates an author

This from the New York Times, 10/14/2008:

"Report Says Acclaimed Czech Writer Informed on a Supposed Spy
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: October 13, 2008

In a revelation that could tarnish the legacy of one of the best-known Eastern European writers, a Czech research institute published a report on Monday indicating that the young Milan Kundera told the police about a supposed spy.
According to the state-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in 1950, long before he became famous for darkly comic novels like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Joke,” Mr. Kundera, who was then 21, told the local police about a guest in a student dormitory where he lived.

The police quickly arrested the man, Miroslav Dvoracek, who had defected to Germany in 1948 and was said to have been recruited by United States-backed anti-Communists as a spy against the Czech government. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Mr. Dvoracek narrowly escaped the death penalty, a common punishment for espionage, and eventually served a 14-year sentence, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

The allegations could diminish Mr. Kundera’s moral stature as a spokesman, however enigmatic, against totalitarianism’s corrosion of daily life.

The reclusive Mr. Kundera vehemently denied the account.

“I object in the strongest manner to these accusations, which are pure lies,” he said in a statement released by his French publisher, Gallimard.

In a rare interview on Monday with the Czech CTK news agency, Mr. Kundera also accused the news media of committing “the assassination of an author.”

The story is the most dramatic recent episode in Eastern Europe’s fitful reckoning with its Communist past, an era that Czechs, with their soft Velvet Revolution against the Soviet system, have been loath to explore deeply.

The report about Mr. Kundera also recalls the case of the German writer Günter Grass, a Nobel laureate, who disclosed in 2006 that he had been a volunteer in the Waffen-SS as a teenager during World War II.

The report also speaks to Mr. Kundera’s vexed relationship with his former homeland. He was a staunch member of the Communist Party until the Soviet invasion in 1968, when he was fired from his teaching post and his work was banned. Expelled from the party in 1970, he emigrated to France in 1975 and has lived there ever since, taking French citizenship. He is respected but not loved in the Czech Republic, where many of his recent books, written in French, have not been translated.

In the interview with the Czech news agency, Mr. Kundera said: “My memory has not tricked me. I did not work for the secret police.”

Yet the institute’s claims do not link him to the secret police. Instead, with its combination of specificity and mystery, a local police report from the time reads like something out of Mr. Kundera’s writing.

Dated March 14, 1950, during the Stalinist terror, it states that “Milan Kundera, student, born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, resident at the Prague VII student hall of residence,” went to the local police at 4 p.m. and made a statement about Iva Militka, another student from the residence.

According to the report, Mr. Kundera learned that Ms. Militka had told a fellow student that she met Mr. Dvoracek, who said he had deserted Czech military service and fled to Germany. He asked her to hold a briefcase “for safekeeping.” Informed by Mr. Kundera about the briefcase, police officers waited for Mr. Dvoracek to return, found that he had a false identity document and arrested him.

The suitcase contained “two hats, two pairs of gloves, two pairs of sunglasses and a tube of cream.”

The claims emerged only now, more than 50 years after the arrest, when a researcher for the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes stumbled onto the police report “by accident” earlier this year, said Vojtech Ripka, the director of the institute’s documentation unit. The institute, which opened in February, was created by the government to research the country’s Communist and Nazi past.

The researcher, Adam Hradilek, was investigating cases like that of Mr. Dvoracek’s: Czechs who fled to Germany after the Communist invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1948 and returned to spy on the Prague government.

Mr. Hradilek and a co-author, Peter Tresnak, published their findings on Monday in Respekt, a Czech political weekly magazine. Martin Simecka, the editor in chief of Respekt, said he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the police report.

Mr. Simecka said that if the Czech authorities had known about the document in the 1970s, they might have used it against Mr. Kundera.

For his part, Mr. Dvoracek suffered a stroke in June and can no longer speak, his wife, Marketa Dvoracek Novak, said in a telephone interview from the couple’s home in Sweden, where they have lived since Mr. Dvoracek’s release from prison in 1964.

She said Mr. Hradilek last week showed her a copy of the police report naming Mr. Kundera, and she had shown it to her husband. “Yes, he understood it, but it didn’t make much difference,” she said. “He just waved his hand. After a whole life, it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

She said her husband did not care who had turned him in. “It doesn’t really matter to him whether it was some very famous bad guy who was the informant, or someone who was not famous at all,” she said.

Nor did she expect an apology or explanation from Mr. Kundera. “No, no, no — that is irrelevant,” she said. “To apologize after 58 years? No.”

Mr. Ripka, of the institute, said he was disappointed Mr. Kundera had not responded more fully.

“We regret that he doesn’t speak more specifically about the case, because he definitely knows more information,” Mr. Ripka said. He denied Mr. Kundera’s claim that the institute had unjustly singled out the author. “We really don’t search archives for attractive information for the media,” he said.

Roberto Calasso, a close friend of Mr. Kundera’s who is the director of Mr. Kundera’s Italian publisher, Adelphi, said the claims stemmed from “a strong acrimony that his country has for him.”

Some others saw the report in a different light.

“I would say this would not be out of character for Kundera or anyone who was so young and so dedicated to the Communist cause,” said Michael Kraus, a Prague native and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, who served on the advisory board that helped establish the research institute.

Although Mr. Kundera’s views later evolved, Mr. Kraus said, back then he was “a true believer.”

“If in fact this is what he did,” Mr. Kraus added, “he was just simply doing his patriotic duty, as he saw it.”

In an interview published in The New York Times in 1985, Mr. Kundera discussed his belief in privacy.

“We live in an age when private life is being destroyed,” he said. “The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it,” he said then.

“Without secrecy,” he added, “nothing is possible — not love, not friendship.”"

From Jason's journal: Sept 29, 08 - The World W/Out Us

Today the House of Reps failed to pass their $700 billion bailout for Wall Street. The Dow dropped 700 points, and the news sites showed pictures of Congressmen looking stricken. Something needs to be done seems to be the consensus among the economic community (including my father, whom I consult on such occasions) and I'm sure something will be done, but for now I don't mind seeing our elected officials look every bit the fool they normally play (and get rich doing so...).

But today was also eventful in that Bookgang met for the 4th time, discussing Alan Wiseman's The World Without Us.

From Book Gang

Stylistically, Wiseman's prose does little to engage the reader. He's not going to leave much of a thumbprint on his sentences, which tend to collect in rather blase paragraphs that offer little in the way of images, figurative language, or salient description. But they do have some serious, mind-fucking content.

The book's central conceit - what would happen to mankind's works and the world at large, should man suddenly disappear - becomes an occasion to discuss mankind's macro environmental impact. A sad story indeed. Strange but appropriate, juxtaposed to the current financial crisis, since the environmental crisis facing us on so many fronts hold far more long-term ills for both us and the planet. Yet, you'd never see the media, much less Congress, make anywhere near the effort to bail out Mother Nature - even though many of the solutions are more readily attainable and predictable. No one knows for certain whether or not a bailout will operate as intended, for example, or if the Gov't would make our money back over time, but banning plastic bags would immediately benefit the environment - though 50+ years of the fuckers will still be swimming in the oceans indefinitely.

The book made for a lively discussion about its intention = whether its intent is to encourage saner, less-damaging lifestyles or simply to make us aware of the fact that our world is fucked.

Reality was tough on us today. I, for one, look forward to going back to fiction.

PS: The next book, TBDiscussed on or around October 26 is Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England.

In Memoriam: DF Wallace, writer, fellow of infinite jest.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times...
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Two days ago I learned David Foster Wallace had hung himself. One of the country’s most gifted essayists, interesting novelists, a signpost of American letters: dead at 46.

Turns out he’d been suffering from (and medicating) depression for the past 20 years. For reasons we will never understand, the depression returned and proved impervious to treatment. As Wallace’s father mentioned to the Times, DF had recently undergone electro-convulsive therapy and different regimes of pharmaceuticals, but the cloud never regained its silver lining. “Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.” Call it psycho-oxidization. Call it the Hemingway or Cobain syndrome. Call it whatever you want. In the end, the description is one of loss.

If you know Wallace, it's probably because of his massive, critically acclaimed novel, Infinite Jest. So much info about DFW and his work is so readily available on the web that discussing either here at length is more than moot – particularly since I’ve never been a steady fan of his fiction and haven’t read even half of his body of work. If you want to bone up on him, you might begin with the three articles already in the Times or Time magazine: Click and Click. The latter link links you to a few examples of Wallace’s journalism/non-fiction – which, for my attention and time, were where he not only excelled but where his humor, observations, care and philosophy waxed brighter than most other writers. This elegy, then, is more of a personal reflection prompted by this sad occasion and my experience reading, with great pleasure, his two wonderful essay collections A Suppossedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, as well as one half of his story collection, The Girl with Curious Hair (plus various stories/interviews/etc in magazines over the years).

Being a morally curious, intellectually driven individual is not merely not easy, it is not without perils. Particularly when, on top of those other identity describers, you throw in the personality-adjectives “creative” or “artistic” – which both go hand-in-hand with a nigh constant demand to produce something worthy. Something of merit. Which you can only likely and reasonably do if you participate in and, question, doubt, evaluate and synthesize not only the culture at large but also your own craft, your own work, and yourself – your own consciousness. All of which can unearth some frightening discoveries, as when Hamlet finds himself holding Yorik's skull and losing his grip on sanity. And while you’re pursuing worthy things, entering those chambers of the mind, the door to Do-Nothing-Land is always open, the trodden welcome mat eerily tempting. Because stepping through it offers you two potent, opiate-like alternatives to the hard work of being the productive person/artist/thinker you'd like to be.

The first is an outright out. A retreat into the oversimplified, self-serving, pleasure-seeking, consumer-commercial life that is mapped out and rubber-stamped and issued like pre-printed birth certificates awaiting our name. Such is the kind of living-by-rote that art in general and literature in particular so often responds to, offering up a kind of antidote of awareness and humanity.

The second is more abstract and metaphysical, and I’ll call it guilt. And maybe it's not so much an egress as a symptom of self-retreat. A core symptom: opium-like in its averse health affects. Guilt here is not the I-grew-up-Catholic or I-cheated-on-my-wife variety, but a guilt that comes from living in a state of half-participation or paralysis. Maybe it's guilt of self-doubt or failure or a sense of failure or of self-retreat, of backing away from the vision you have for your ideal self. And the real, utter bitch of having this kind of guilt is that the dark cloud is still see-through: you can clearly observe your soul, its gleaming promise and its potential to realize your now aborted but still loved ambitions and passions (I could be a writer! I could be a director! etc). The truly lame thing about feeling this particular kind of shitty is you damn well know you're neglecting elemental elements of your identity, those things about yourself that make you feel cool/proud/satisfied and deeply happy. Despite being in the dark cloud of guilt, you still know you’re capable of being better. Even though you're not pursuing your passion, you're painfully aware of it. Like a toothache that suddenly tears at your jaw when you drink too-cold water. And the guilt does not provide you the comfort of ignorance or stupidity. You understand pursuing your passions is the only way to achieve some progress, some tangible results, whether they’re poems, plays, short stories, films, etc. And producing your art or following your path, you know, is more likely to keep you within that critical mental frame of Awareness. You reach a mental altitude, a climate of thinking and feeling which nourishes a kind of psycho-spiritual ecosystem where the creative process at least has a shot at viability. And because you know all of this, whenever you don’t sit down and paint or write or whatever, you feel guilty. And sometimes that guilt metastasizes into sadness. Or depression.

If we take as a given that self-actualization is a temporary state of being (analogous maybe to a high performance engine requiring high octane fuel, calibrations, routine maintenance and occasional overhauling) then we might reasonably claim that this sweet-spot of ephiphanic awareness is surrounded by toxic cesspools and slicks that are the byproducts of its very pursuit. (ie, The more of yourself you discover, the more self there is to doubt or loathe; likewise, the more work you produce, the greater opportunity for rejection.) So, loathing and cynicism. Existential unmooring. They can bring about a bleak, mortal logic or anti-epiphany that concludes: Why bother? What’s the fucking difference? Or: I just can't stand it anymore. Such verbalizations can tug you toward the proverbial bottom.

I’m not guessing at the causes behind DF Wallace’s suicide, but pointing out conditions that exist, that I sense sometimes, anyway, in myself and in my friends and in America. In fact, America might be the best and only way to describe Wallace’s writing: Only in America does his peculiar, post-modern blend of style and thinking truly resonate with hope and inspiration and become a buttress against despair. Wallace’s essays went beyond “stimulating” my mind. His intellect struck me as infectious, even transformative, his well-sanded logic providing a surface on which my own ideas could glide. Only in America, the country that gives us a single DFW in monumental disproportion to the throngs of self-serving assholes who prosecute the most frustrating aspects of this absurd society, this strange, often maddening/saddening culture, only here is the work of writers like Wallace possible. No, necessary.

-Jason Watt

BGNYC Take 3

So it was Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood we discussed last Sunday at Prospect Park for our 3rd Book Gang meeting. A mixed review from the five Book Gangbangers: Jason, Leslie, Beth, Sharon, Jenna, and Yelana. We opted to sit back and hear what made Jason "laugh out loud on the train" before launching into a hearty heart-to-heart on this short novel.

Flannery had us questioning her faith (and ours) and Hazel Motes' bizarre path to un/redemption. But all in all at the end of the day the story left us as if we had put on a gorilla suit ourselves and disappeared into the park. Yelana, our newest member, was the winner of best book cover and was exempt of being jumped into the gang for bringing the best treats to share!


Drinks continued in Prospect Heights before dubbing our meeting another success! For the record, Sharon has promised her infamous Jealous Marys at the next meeting which will be held Sunday September 21st. After much discussion, the choice of our newest read, was left to the results of a popular vote: Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Location and time to be determined by this month's gang leader, Leslie.

Biblical allusions, loads of white wine, and Flannery O'Connor

"A blind man sat by the road and he cried/He cried show me the way/Show me the truth/ Show me the light... the way to go home...
Jesus sat by the road and he cried/I am the way/I am the truth/I am the Light... the way to go home." -- Traditional Christian spiritual

"A Blind Beggar Receives His Sight

As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard the crowd going by, he asked what was happening. They told him, 'Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.'

He called out, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!'

Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, 'Son of David, have mercy on me!'

Jesus stopped and ordered the man to be brought to him. When he came near, Jesus asked him, 'What do you want me to do for you?'
'Lord, I want to see,' he replied.

Jesus said to him, 'Receive your sight; your faith has healed you.' Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus, praising God. When all the people saw it, they also praised God." The Gospel of Luke, 18:35 New International Bible



On Sunday afternoon, August 17, Book Gang congregated in Prospect Park underneath our big tree to meet and discuss Flannery O'Connor's novel, Wise Blood. Beth, Jason, Jenna, Leslie and Sharon were joined by new Gangster Yelena (who all agreed brought the most awesome snacks; bite-sized Kit Kats, Mounds and peanut M&M's, Cheez Puffs and Capri Suns.)

Beth opened up the discussion with some biography on O'Connor, a Southern Gothic writer often pigeonholed for her "grotesque characters," but who defended herself by saying that's basically what Southern Christians really are like and if she purposefully tried to write grotesque, well, everything would come out like a Northern's reality. During her short life (died at age 39 of complications from lupus) O'Connor was often overlooked by book reviewers and criticized, but posthumously many have praised her short stories.
Several book gangsters also voiced preference for her short stories, and during the meeting it was discussed why this particular novel might have worked better in short story form, or even adapted for screen. Jason adeptly pointed out how cinematic many of her scenes are and we all had a good laugh imaging Enoch Emery perched on a rock contemplating the sunset in his gorilla suit.

I felt inspired to write in the blog because I kept thinking back to the latter part of the discussion, and people's input on what reasons Hazel Motes had for blinding and further martyrizing himself, and the role that religion plays in the novel.

Beth's biographical overview discussed that O'Connor was a devout Roman Catholic living in the Protestant Bible Belt. In some of her stories, most notably "A Good Man is Hard to Find" critics have drawn out selections that would indicate a subtle hostility towards the actions of Protestant Christians, and mild pokes at their acts of hypocracy in their day-to-day lives. Like Jason said, it is hard to think about O'Connor writing Wise Blood, a tale rife with twisted, misguided, ill-fated, and even atheist characters, where at the end no one is selfless and/or kind; no one is redeemed; no one has a spiritual awakening--essentially no one gets saved. It just doesn't seem too nice of a good Catholic girl to speak of man's evils and wrongs and jerks who spit in the face of God.

I puzzled over this a lot after our meaning because I really wanted to find O'Connor's God in the book and also because I just couldn't walk away from it not seeing some kind of moral or lesson that we should learn. It was too hard for me to accept that Hazel Motes' death didn't have some kind of meaning or message. So bear with me, Gangsters, for using the blog to wax religion-ical, but here's what I came up with.

Sharon really hit the nail on the head when she was answering my question about if the "false" preacher "blinded" himself with quicklime to prove how devout and true his faith in God was (even though we know he was unsuccessful, and most likely cowardly and corrupt), why would Hazel Motes blind himself, when he had professed that he "didn't believe in anything?" If not an act of faith, then what was it?

Sharon's point was, after the cop kicked his car over the cliff, he had nothing to live for. As she put it, he probably did not want to see the rest of the ride.

Thinking about this in the shower, I decided that this was O'Connor's critique of a life lived without a spiritual thirst for God and truth--a life devoid of spirual light--and her critique on materialism.

Simply, the car was Hazel's everything; his reason to live. He put pride into it, and even smugly walked away from the mechanic who said he couldn't do anything with it and went to a guy that he said was "honest," that is, he told him everything he wanted to hear about the car and inflated his vanity and his ego. To someone devout like O'Connor, this kind of pride would seem empty, even humorous. So when he loses the car, he has nothing to live for. Along with the car, all of his plans of leaving town and starting anew were ruined. He became like a man lost--a blind man. So, to blind himself at that point could make sense. I think this is O'Connor's Thomist parable to those who do not know Jesus--they are doomed to wander and suffer and inflict needless self-pain without comfort or release until the end of their days, like Hazel Motes with his barbed wire corset and glass-shard orthopedic soles. (Not that a good Christian lady like O'Connor would judge; that's God's job. But hey, it's fiction, she's allowed to make an example out of Haze). See the way that money became meaningless after he lost his one thing to live for? No person could comfort Haze at the end, because he no longer had any spiritual compass or meaning for his life.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on that. Hope you Gangsters don't mind me quoting scripture on our bad-assssssss blog! Please people post on this and other topics!

Who is stoked for The World Without Us? Like a good blogger, I ordered mine from Powells.com. Yay.

Talkin' LCL at the Second Chance Saloon. 7/7/08.

Jenna led our discussion of Lady Chatterley's Lover and helped steam up the windows of the Second Chance Saloon, a metal bar in Williamsburg. Beth Duerr won the sexiest / funniest cover prize. We ordered way too much pizza and then took the discussion to Sweet Ups, and talked our way into the wee hours about the metaphoric possibilities of words like "cunt" and "fuck." Jenna made the night's most interesting comment, which will forever change our reading of the book when she said, "Whenever Mellors talked I'd think of Groundskeeper Willy."

The Second Chance Saloon turned out to be this metal bar. Besides us, there were about four or five hair farmers in the place, but they were screaming as if at a Metallica concert. But Bookgang proceeded in the face of these great odds, thanks to the bravery of members like Jenna and Leslie.
















Beth won the prize for best LCL cover.



















Conversation (and cordials) continued at Sweet Ups.

Book Gang Unites! 6.7.2008

We met at Prospect Park to discuss Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This was the first hot as balls day of summer, but Book Gang is fire and heat resistant. Our only vulnerability seems to be mescal margaritas, which we discovered drinking Sharon's. She made the batch from scratch and mixed us up. When some people down the lawn heard about Book Gang, they were inspired enough to bring out a fifty foot American flag and wave it around. "Hey, you could have just honored us by reading a book," we said. "A what?" they said.