Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka - Softcover

Hrabal, Bohumil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8090217192 ISBN 13: 9788090217195

Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press, 1990

Synopsis

In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) between 1989 and 1991 but never sent, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) chronicles the momentous events of those years as seen, more often than not, from the windows of his favorite pubs. In his palavering, stream-of-conscious style that has marked him as one of the major writers and innovators of postwar European literature, Hrabal gives a humorous and at times moving account of life in Prague under Nazi occupation, Communism, and the brief euphoria following the revolution of 1989 when anything seemed possible, even pink tanks. Interspersed are fragmented memories of trips taken to Britain - as he attempted to track down every location mentioned in Eliot's "The Waste Land" - and the United States, where he ends up in one of Dylan Thomas's haunts comparing the waitresses to ones he knew in Prague. The result is a masterful blend of personal history and fee association rendered in a prose as powerful as it is poetic..

About this title

About the Authors

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, one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the postwar period.

James Naughton was Professor of Czech Language and Literature at Oxford University until his death in 2014. His translations of Czech literature included Bohumil Hrabal's The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and The Jingle Bell Principle by Miroslav Holub.

Edition details

• Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8090217192
• ISBN 13: 9788090217195
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204