Where do you want to go today? Prague under Stalin, steelworks and street scenes, ushers and stonemasons, dairymen and judges, people who form your world, and, simultaneously, undermine it. Bohumil Hrabal, you have to love him for his name, the soft burr of syllables, and, once you've read a few pages, his bemused, ironic look at the world around him, all of it.
MR KAFKA and Other Tales, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, has occupied my head for the last week or two. I don't know what I think so I read a tale or two again. I dip about so that certain words register and gradually I form a picture of this Hrabal, this side of me that understands Hrabal, that can mingle with his people and their perversity, their absentmindedness in the face of history.
Everything I read I try on like clothes. I am dragged by the hair through the streets of Prague. I drown in discarded letters. I ride the gondola of a steelworks gantry. Where did I go today? I sojourned in Hrabal land.
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