Bohumil Hrabal wrote a whole book as one sentence and told stories in a Prague pub
One of the great Czech writers of the 20th century spent years packing waste paper, labouring in a steelworks and moving scenery before his first book appeared, at 49. His novel Closely Observed Trains became an Oscar-winning film, and his book Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age runs as a single unbroken sentence.
Hrabal was born in 1914 near Brno to an unmarried mother and raised largely by grandparents before she married František Hrabal, who ran a brewery in the Elbe town of Nymburk. The boy took his stepfather's name, treated him as his real father, and later made him a leading character in his fiction. A poor student who failed his first year of grammar school, he enrolled in law in Prague in 1935 but could not graduate until 1946 because the Nazis shut Czech universities.
The jobs fed the books. Wartime work as a railway dispatcher near Nymburk became Closely Observed Trains. After the war he sold insurance, laboured beside the artist Vladimír Boudník at the Kladno steelworks, baled paper at a recycling mill in Prague, and worked as a stagehand. A poetry collection of 1948 was pulled when the communists took power, and his first book of stories was withdrawn a week before publication in 1959 and released only in 1963.
After the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 he was banned, and two finished books were blocked in 1970 after printing and binding. Works including I Served the King of England circulated in samizdat. A 1975 interview in which he seemed to recant, with ideological lines later found to have been inserted by editors, let him publish again in censored form; young dissidents burned his books on Kampa Island, while others argued the regime had simply been forced to acknowledge him.
His director friend Jiří Menzel filmed Closely Observed Trains in 1966, and it won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. Hrabal held court at the pub U zlatého tygra, where in January 1994 he drank with Václav Havel, Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright. He died in 1997 and was buried in an oak coffin marked Polná Brewery, where his mother and stepfather had met. His work exists in 27 languages.
Source: Bohumil Hrabal
