Praise
"Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer."
— Milan Kundera
"Thanks to Stacey Knechtโs expert translation, one of the 20th centuryโs most inventive literary talents feels very much alive."
— Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis StarTribune
"Hrabalโs light, cascading prose, with its resistant undercurrents of pauses, diversions and repetitions, is perfectly suited to his themes. He carries you along on a sensuous rush of detail, and then suddenly bumps you against the bedrock of history. This is a mesmerizing novel, beautifully translated."
— Ivan Vladislaviฤ
"[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)
"As the narrator reminisces and her fellow pensioners tell their stories of the past, we sense that rather than standing still, time is running in parallel, and the people in their colourful tales are still very much alive, while also being long since dead and gone. Meanwhile, the lovely ballet music of โHarlequinโs Millionsโ drifts throughout the castle as a constant accompaniment to Hrabalโs lilting prose, which has lost none of its lyricism in Stacey Knechtโs magnificent translation."
— Antonia Lloyd-Jones, PEN English
"...like that celebrated downer, 'King Lear,' the novel leaves one not just shaken but exalted. Youth and age, health and sickness, past and present โ these are lifeโs great polarities, and Bohumil Hrabal honors them all."
— Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Hrabal started out as a surrealist poet, and his stories and novels are written in the form of prose poetry, which borders on surrealism while remaining highly readable. Like his literary idol, Jaroslav Haลกek, the author of The Good Soldier ล vejk, Hrabal recorded and made use of aimless, often coarse conversations overheard in Czech pubs. But unlike his cynical โolder brotherโ, Hrabal juxtaposed this with lyricism and sentiment, dabbled in automatic writing, made verbal collages, switched from comedy to tragedy, and hopped between styles without warning. His vocabulary is as rich as that of James Joyce. The effect is magical and impossible to translate in its full beauty, though the translatorโฆdeserve[s] high praise."
— Zuzana Slobodovรก, The Times Literary Supplement
"Bohumil Hrabal, for all reductive purposes, is the Czech Proust: meaning, heโs of the same stirring brilliance, but also meaning that Proust is the French Hrabal."
— Tweed's
"Billed as โa fairy tale,โ the novel...fancifully confounds expectations: a visiting doctorโs lesson on classical music turns into a psychotic rampage, for example. And Hrabalโs long, lyrical sentences (each chapter consists of a single paragraph) are not only exquisitely constructed, but also as spirited as the scenes they illustrate."
— Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"Hrabal combines good humour and hilarity with tenderness and a tragic sense of his country's history."
— The Observer
"This is a gorgeous, fearful tale about the brutal march of time and a celebration of the audacious vivacity that leads some to cling to love and memory despite it."
— Michelle Anne Schlinger, ForeWord Reviews
"Those readers who are familiar with Hrabal, an author touted in and outside of the Czech Republic as one of the great writers of the 20th Century, will relish in revisiting characters from his previous works, but new readers will have a fine introduction to the stylings of one of literatureโs most noted writers."
— Ariell Cacciola, Monkeybicycle
"His realism is a kind of gentle hysteria; his world is undeniably ours but rendered through what pretends to be unbridled, aimless speech. It is kindled speech, Hrabal seems to be telling us, that creates the reality and for this reason he has no taste for conventional novelistic telling. His generosity is the access to actuality as it rises up in language. Here lie the pleasure and the beauty."
— Ron Slate, On the Seawall
"You get to laze around in beautiful, page-long sentences deep with observation and memory. The rhythm and lyricism are powerful and subtle... It stays perched at the top of my longlist."
— BTBA Judge George Carroll, Three Percent
Praise for I Served the King of England:
A comic novel of great inventiveness . . . charming, wise, and sadโand an unexpectedly good laugh.
— Philadelphia Inquirer
"An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel."
— The New York Times
"A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude."
— James Wood, The London Review of Books
"Dancing Lessons unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence. The gambit works. Something about that slab of wordage carries the eye forward, promising an intensity unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel."
— Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review
"Praise for The Little Town Where Time Stood Still:
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 a hushed tenderness of detail."
— Julian Barnes
"Praise for Too Loud a Solitude:
Short, sharp and eccentric. Sophisticated, thought-provoking and pithy."
— Spectator
"Unmissable, combines extremes of comedy and seriousness, plus pathos, slapstick, sex and violence all stirred into one delicious brew."
— The Guardian
"In imaginative riches and sheer exhilaration it offers more than most books twice its size. At once tender and scatological, playful and sombre, moving and irresistibly funny."
— The Independent on Sunday
"Hrabal chooses to immerse his characters ever deeper in the past, exploring and finding what others have forgotten, taking a Proustian luxury in memory."
— Michelle E. Crouch, Cleaver Magazine
"[Bohumil Hrabal] ...clearly communicates to us his fear of death... The translation by Stacey Knecht into English is excellent... The โCzechnessโ of Hrabalโs sentences sounds organic in this translation, not a small achievement in English... This book is another of Hrabalโs stories to be enjoyed by all readers, even those who do not know Czech."
— Mila Saskova-Pierce, Slavic and East European Journal
Extras
Read an excerpt inย Asymptote Journal.
Translator Stacey Knecht wrote about her connection to Hrabal and his work for the blog Slavische Studies. Read it here.
Browse which of his works have been adapted to film at the Czech Film Center.
A great review of Harlequins Millions by Pierre Joris following Hrabal’s 100th birthday.