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.”"