The life of Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) is an orderly succession of catastrophes (two world wars, the Sovietization of Czechoslovakia, the hopeful Prague Spring, its crushing by Russian troops, the end of the Soviet yoke and the subsequent division of the country , four years before his death, in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic). An ordered succession of catastrophes that can only be contemplated through horror or humor, and the latter is the path that the resistant Bohumil Hrabal chose for his literature. A good part of his work has been published in Spain, fortunately, which has allowed us to read a master of satire who has his roots in surrealism and whose references are the formidable and torrential orality of a Louis Ferdinand Céline full of rude jargon. and Joyce's expressive audacity, which reminds me of that of another very beloved Irishman in the publishing house that offers us this book today, Flann O'Brien, who would surely have fascinated Hrabal.
Yes, because his writing, especially that which is manifested in the seven stories in this book, adheres to the absurdity of nonsense as an expressive form with an innovative meaning. Published in 1965, the same year as his first masterpiece, Rigorously monitored trains. Three years later, after the Russian tanks crushed the Prague Spring, his books were withdrawn from circulation and could only be made known in a restricted way in the form of samizdat (clandestine copies of books) until, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they returned to the light. Masterpieces like I who have served the king of England, A solitude too noisy and Tender Barbarian.
Mr. Kafka They are seven stories that have their roots in surrealism – which is found in all of his early works – and will disconcert the reader due to their difficulty and fascinate him/her due to their imaginative development and satirical force. In a society governed by the experiments of Soviet communism in search of the creation of the “new socialist man”, only humor and satire are the oxygen needed to survive.
The writer suffered the two world wars, the Sovietization of the country, the end of that yoke and the division of Czechoslovakia
In the story titled 'Beautiful Poldi', the narrator refers to the Poldi steel mill with this beautiful image: “Now, often, when I see a great star, I think it is the evening star. In reality it is the tongue of a welder, a melancholic little blue flame, the descent of the Holy Spirit, whose touch reddens the iron.” Hrabal, a railway and metallurgist among other trades, worked in that steel mill. The story titled 'Mr. Kafka', which gives the title to this edition, is a hilarious tribute by the author to Franz Kafka himself, it begins like this: “Every morning the landlord tiptoes into my room, I can hear his footsteps. The room is so long that you could ride a bicycle from the door to my bed” (…) Sometimes I imagine a different awakening: what if my landlord announced when I woke up that I was not there?”
His stories admirably show the relationship between oppression and tenderness in a world conditioned by an unbearable ideological directive. Another image: in 'The Angel', the guardian of the inmates who carry war scrap, cuts out a girl's guardian angel from an engraving, hides it behind her back under her shirt, and it reads: “When she went out to the outside, he ran to reach the prey and walked after them as their guard, he felt that the wings of the image took root in his body (…) and that nothing would prevent him from continuing to take care of the women that had been entrusted to him, even if it was bad. and against the rules, and that in this way he himself would be redeemed.” Humor and tenderness against barbarism.
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