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x150151041's review against another edition
"Man has refused to live in a primitive state of nature, which is why angels drive ambulances and gather up other angels who have been broken in half."
cythera15's review against another edition
4.0
This book is special to me because I "ran into" it during my travels. I was in Czechoslovakia, a country I know absolutely nothing about. But when I found a bookstore, I had to visit it, and because it was in front of the National Museum, where it was full of tourists from all around the world, this gigantic bookstore carried English books as well. I was hyped because I had just visited the Kafka museum the other day and really wanted to read Kafka. However, instead, I ran into Hrabal's book.
I started reading this book on the train back to Berlin. It was really hard to read, especially because I was tired and the sleepy passenger in the cabin was making me sleepy, too. But moreover, it was hard for me to understand what was going on in this novel. There were so many words that I was unfamiliar with - starting from the Czech names that I cannot even pronounce in my head or transliterate into Korean to endless lists of tools that I have never even seen before. So, I started to flip to the end of the book for "explanation" - which helped a little, because now I learned that this book was written after Hrabal was forced to "volunteer" and work in a steel mill under a communist government. That cleared some things up. However, what mesmerized me about this book was Hrabal's words that were quoted in the Translator's Note at the end of the book.
This quote was the reason I powered through the end of the book because I could relate so much to it. My world, too, is filled with impossible metaphors that I pretend to be natural and they come from works of literature that, despite how much I love them, are ultimately alienated from me. It is imagining a German forest without actually being in one, knowing the name of the flowers from poetry without knowing its smell; it is that glass of vodka, whiskey, gin or sherry that I have never tasted before. Ever since college, this discrepancy between the things I read and the world that I am in has been haunting me.
But I've never really had the courage to challenge them. Mostly because I know what is going to come out of that challenge - a total confusion for readers, just the way I was confused with Hrabal's description of the scrap steel thrown into the fire. I could write about the life that is around me - all those tabs open on my MacBook screen, how I feel when I play Sombra on Overwatch, words like "lol," "insta," "glhf" that I use daily... but I am still caught under the illusion that these cannot be beautiful. Moreover, because they are not beautiful, they cannot be "real literature." I tell myself that these are just some dumb ramblings of a young woman in the early 21st century. Even though I am theoretically convinced otherwise.
Reading Hrabal, I felt more courageous to experiment with my "natural language." This world as I know it is constantly challenging the fictional world that I embraced through literature, especially the so-called "Western literary canons." Maybe it is time to stop referring to the trees that I have never seen and to the streets that I will never walk in. It felt like the right time to accept the challenges of the real world and see what new beautiful metaphors that I can derive from it.
I would definitely like to read Hrabal again after I do some more background work. I don't know if I will have time for it anytime soon (or the willpower for that matter) but hopefully, I can revisit it with better eyes and see the details that I have missed out on this time.
I started reading this book on the train back to Berlin. It was really hard to read, especially because I was tired and the sleepy passenger in the cabin was making me sleepy, too. But moreover, it was hard for me to understand what was going on in this novel. There were so many words that I was unfamiliar with - starting from the Czech names that I cannot even pronounce in my head or transliterate into Korean to endless lists of tools that I have never even seen before. So, I started to flip to the end of the book for "explanation" - which helped a little, because now I learned that this book was written after Hrabal was forced to "volunteer" and work in a steel mill under a communist government. That cleared some things up. However, what mesmerized me about this book was Hrabal's words that were quoted in the Translator's Note at the end of the book.
I had begun building my house from the roof on down ... always emphasizing the facade and the decorative touches... I had borrowed a little from Rimbaud, a little from Baudelaire, a little from Eluard, and again from Celine. I used artificial clusters of words as though they were natural linguistic signs, and so I invested more and more impossible metaphors - until Kladno
This quote was the reason I powered through the end of the book because I could relate so much to it. My world, too, is filled with impossible metaphors that I pretend to be natural and they come from works of literature that, despite how much I love them, are ultimately alienated from me. It is imagining a German forest without actually being in one, knowing the name of the flowers from poetry without knowing its smell; it is that glass of vodka, whiskey, gin or sherry that I have never tasted before. Ever since college, this discrepancy between the things I read and the world that I am in has been haunting me.
But I've never really had the courage to challenge them. Mostly because I know what is going to come out of that challenge - a total confusion for readers, just the way I was confused with Hrabal's description of the scrap steel thrown into the fire. I could write about the life that is around me - all those tabs open on my MacBook screen, how I feel when I play Sombra on Overwatch, words like "lol," "insta," "glhf" that I use daily... but I am still caught under the illusion that these cannot be beautiful. Moreover, because they are not beautiful, they cannot be "real literature." I tell myself that these are just some dumb ramblings of a young woman in the early 21st century. Even though I am theoretically convinced otherwise.
Reading Hrabal, I felt more courageous to experiment with my "natural language." This world as I know it is constantly challenging the fictional world that I embraced through literature, especially the so-called "Western literary canons." Maybe it is time to stop referring to the trees that I have never seen and to the streets that I will never walk in. It felt like the right time to accept the challenges of the real world and see what new beautiful metaphors that I can derive from it.
I would definitely like to read Hrabal again after I do some more background work. I don't know if I will have time for it anytime soon (or the willpower for that matter) but hopefully, I can revisit it with better eyes and see the details that I have missed out on this time.
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