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Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) worked as a railway dispatcher during the Nazi occupation of then-Czechoslovakia, a traveling salesman, a steelworker, a recycling mill worker, and a stagehand. His novels, which include Too Loud a Solitude, Closely Watched Trains, and I Served the King of England, were censored under the Communist regime and have since been translated into nearly thirty languages. He fell to his death from the fifth floor of a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the pigeons. The author lives in Czech Republic.
""A surreal and loquacious tale. . . . Billed as ""a fairy tale,"" the novel, at times, fancifully confounds expectations. . . and Hrabal's long, lyrical sentences (each chapter consists of a single paragraph) are not only eloquently constructed, but also as spirited as the scenes they illustrate."" --Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""[A] uniquely compelling blend of parable, fantasy, social realism and testament to the power of storytelling. . . . the voice of the narrator is spellbinding, even as the reader becomes less sure of her credibility. . . . An enchanting novel, full of life, about the end of life."" --Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) ""Hrabal’s images and language, his anecdotes and precise observations create an exceptionally sensuous reverie about the passage of time. . . Hrabal elicits from his adult reader not just sweet Proustian melancholy but also a better, deeper appreciation of the bright but evanescent sunshine outside."" -- Washington Post ""Knecht has guided this quiet book into an engaging, heartfelt experience without letting it drop into mawkish emofiction."" -- Shelf Awareness ""You get to laze around in beautiful, page-long sentences deep with observation and memory. The rhythm and lyricism are powerful and subtle. I can’t believe I’m writing this. It sounds like a book I would detest. And yet it stays perched at the top of my longlist."" -- BTBA Judge George Carroll ""The song ['Harlequin’s Millions'] infuses the book, a sad soundtrack to a novel that manages to be vibrant and wistful. Thanks to Stacey Knecht’s expert translation, one of the 20th century’s most inventive literary talents feels very much alive."" — Malcolm Forbes, The Minneapolis Star Tribune ""Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer."" --Milan Kundera ""Hrabal, to my mind, is one of the greatest living European prose writers."" --Philip Roth, 1990 ""There are pages of queer magic unlike anything else currently being done with words."" --The Guardian ""Hrabal is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and hushed tenderness of detail."" --Julian Barnes ""What Hrabal has created is an informal history of the indomitable Czech spirit. And perhaps ... the human spirit."" --The Times ""“Bohumil Hrabal, for all reductive purposes, is the Czech Proust: meaning, he’s of the same stirring brilliance, but also meaning that Proust is the French Hrabal. . . Few possess a voice as bold as any one of the many Hrabal has served up. . . What is not okay is to let him slip away from a mainstream eye, and stay reserved for readers looking to 'challenge' themselves."" -- Tweed's Magazine of Literature and Art
