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A review by krtka
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still by Bohumil Hrabal
4.0
This is the first book that I have read by this author. For a long time, I have had "I Served the King of England" on my wish list. I saw this book on sale and bought it as a substitute, and glad to have read it. I enjoyed this book a lot and found it more humorous than I anticipated from a translation. Uncle Pepin is a wonderful character, and the stories he relates are the kind you wish your own uncle would have told you, for e.g....
"And so Adolf had no luck in life, once he was passing this pub, and some drunken dentists were there, and they invited Adolf for a drink, and when he'd had some and was glad folks were being nice to him again, all of a sudden one dentist in a drunken stupor pulled out another dentist's front teeth, and seeing as Adolf was drunk too, the one that pulled out the front teeth took Adolf and pulled out all of his back teeth, mind you Adolf was dead lucky there was no drunken gelders around that night..."
The run-on sentences and lack of periods in punctuation are common in the book...not sure if that's a result of the translation, or the Czech, or just Hrabal's writing style. This took a bit of getting used to...
This book has been made into a movie, and I found it available for streaming on the Internet. Alas, it is in Czech and there are no subtitles, but watching just a bit led me to believe that it is true to the story line.
"And so Adolf had no luck in life, once he was passing this pub, and some drunken dentists were there, and they invited Adolf for a drink, and when he'd had some and was glad folks were being nice to him again, all of a sudden one dentist in a drunken stupor pulled out another dentist's front teeth, and seeing as Adolf was drunk too, the one that pulled out the front teeth took Adolf and pulled out all of his back teeth, mind you Adolf was dead lucky there was no drunken gelders around that night..."
The run-on sentences and lack of periods in punctuation are common in the book...not sure if that's a result of the translation, or the Czech, or just Hrabal's writing style. This took a bit of getting used to...
This book has been made into a movie, and I found it available for streaming on the Internet. Alas, it is in Czech and there are no subtitles, but watching just a bit led me to believe that it is true to the story line.