I Served the King of England: 0 (New Directions Classics) - Softcover

Hrabal, Bohumil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081121687X ISBN 13: 9780811216876

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2007

Synopsis

In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia.
First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.

About this title

Review:

"The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography" (Times Literary Supplement)

"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)

"Well worth reading" (The Book Magazine)

Book Description:

'Our very best writer today' Milan Kundera

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 081121687X
• ISBN 13: 9780811216876
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256