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Mr Kafka
Bohumil Hrabal
€ 13.99
€ 10.74
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Description for Mr Kafka
Paperback. Mr Kafka is avoiding his landlady's blueberry wine breath, a stonemason witnesses the destruction of a monument to Stalin he risked his life to build, and factory men strain to catch a glimpse of a beautiful bathing murderess. Num Pages: 208 pages. BIC Classification: FA; FYT. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 198 x 129. .
Enter the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague, the steelworks run by singed men, the covered market that smells of new-born babes, the cacophonous open-air dance hall. Mr Kafka is avoiding his landlady's blueberry wine breath, a stonemason witnesses the destruction of a monument to Stalin he risked his life to build, and factory men strain to catch a glimpse of a beautiful bathing murderess. In these newly discovered stories, Hrabal captures men and women in an eerily beautiful nightmare and their spirit in all its misery and splendour.
Enter the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague, the steelworks run by singed men, the covered market that smells of new-born babes, the cacophonous open-air dance hall. Mr Kafka is avoiding his landlady's blueberry wine breath, a stonemason witnesses the destruction of a monument to Stalin he risked his life to build, and factory men strain to catch a glimpse of a beautiful bathing murderess. In these newly discovered stories, Hrabal captures men and women in an eerily beautiful nightmare and their spirit in all its misery and splendour.
Product Details
Publisher
Vintage Publishing United Kingdom
Number of pages
208
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2016
Condition
New
Number of Pages
160
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781784871178
SKU
V9781784871178
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-45
About Bohumil Hrabal
Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his hyper-realist texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. In February 1997 he flew out of his hospital window never to return.
Reviews for Mr Kafka
Hrabal's magical stories are comic and human... They inhabit a utopian province, the realm of laughter and tears... A great writer
James Wood
London Review of Books
Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairytale and satire. He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him
Julian Barnes The discovery of Hrabal's style is very simple. It makes pleasure a principle... Each of Hrabal's novels describes a spiral, a constant intricate movement between pleasure and fear and guilt and delight: they describe the difficult effort to be a hedonist in a world where pleasure has disappeare
Adam Thirlwell
Guardian
One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination
Milan Kundera Written 50 years ago, in a country whose system of government is utterly alien to our lived experience, these stories are still laugh-aloud funny on pretty much every page
Spectator
James Wood
London Review of Books
Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairytale and satire. He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him
Julian Barnes The discovery of Hrabal's style is very simple. It makes pleasure a principle... Each of Hrabal's novels describes a spiral, a constant intricate movement between pleasure and fear and guilt and delight: they describe the difficult effort to be a hedonist in a world where pleasure has disappeare
Adam Thirlwell
Guardian
One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination
Milan Kundera Written 50 years ago, in a country whose system of government is utterly alien to our lived experience, these stories are still laugh-aloud funny on pretty much every page
Spectator