#karolinum press

[grolierpoetry]

Job in Winter Done shedding leaves, The trees are bare. The garden grieves arms in the air

The Well at Morning

Bohuslav Reynek Translated by Justin Quinn University of Chicago Press

[powerhousearena]

Hrabal's Ramblings

Great essay by Meghan Forbes on Bohumil Hrabal's Rambling On: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab (Karolinum Press: 2014) over at LARB: 

The promise of recurrence is perhaps the defining principle of Hrabal’s prose. Characters within a story often speak in circles that continually draw their yarns back into focus; characters from past stories will pop up again in later ones, adding greater dimension to the people in Hrabal’s tales. Ominously, it is the police commandant who recurs most often. Always interrupting late-night revelries, his posturing is at once sinister and ridiculous. Hrabal, with a wink to the reader, lays his cards bare when the police commandant suddenly appears alongside two wheelchair-ridden friends making their way home in the snow: “I spotted, in one of the side avenues, a Volga parked, with the police commandant leaning against it, lost in thought, just as he always popped up, so he popped up now, whenever he wasn’t expected, up he popped.” The way in which the same characters pop up and are woven through the stories in Rambling On leaves us with the sense that it is more than a collection of fragments of village life, that each story is a chapter in a loose narrative, revealed gradually through the circular reemergence of motifs and individuals. The content of Rambling On is mirrored in its structure; the iconic banter of Hrabal’s characters is replicated on a larger scale, as an organizing principle for the book as a whole. 

If you've never read the Czech giant, go out right now and grab I Served the King of England, out on the wonderful New Directions Press. An absolute classic. 

-Hal-