In Service

Letters

Vol. 11 No. 13 · 6 July 1989

From Rodney Pybus

History has a long reach, and Chamberlain’s notorious ignorance of Czechoslovakia fifty years ago has not entirely faded. (It was said that Karel Capek, one of the best-known pre-war Czech writers, died of a heart pierced by Chamberlain’s umbrella.) Anthony Thwaite (LRB, 18 May) seems therefore to be on rather dangerous ground in trying to judge fiction by the criterion of national likes and dislikes. Bohumil Hrabal, now in his mid-seventies and one of Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished post-war writers, deserves to have his newly (and excellently) translated novel I served the King of England given more serious consideration than a hasty dismissal as a piece of Continental frippery. Mr Thwaite no doubt has reasons for devoting six times as much space to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, but Hrabal’s novel is far more than ‘a free-wheeling journey through Bohemia and Magical Realism’. Hrabal is exuberant (we agree), sensuous, subversive, erotic, illuminating, and very funny. There is, for instance, a ‘flower-plaiting’ scene which, unlike D.H. Lawrence’s in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is wholly successful precisely because it is intentionally humorous as well as persuasively tender and erotic. My guess is that admirers of Hasek’s Schweik will not be disappointed, nor will those who have seen only the film of Hrabal’s Closely-Observed Trains.

Humour and tastes, of course, differ, but Anthony Thwaite seems to have invented (or reinvented) a criterion for literary judgment based on national stereotypes. The novel is by a Czech, about a Czech, and set in Bohemia; one of the things it does most effectively is to satirise the Nazis’ grotesque theories about eugenics. I can imagine there might be potential readers of Hrabal who would be reassured by your reviewer’s evidence that Germans nowadays find a pointedly witty attack on breeding-for-the-state both hilarious and laudable. But even if this were a German novel, I don’t think I’d want to try to imagine why he should say: ‘Much of it strikes me as being more like what the Germans think of as uproariously funny than we do and indeed the advance publicity includes two encomiastic quotations from German papers.’ Oh well, that’s all right, then – we can certainly give it a miss. It’s probably as boring as The Tin Drum. After all, they probably like Milan Kundera too. (He’s the Czech writer who calls this novel ‘one of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humour and baroque imagination’.)

Rodney Pybus
Sudbury, Suffolk