Cutting it Short [Hardcover]

If only, if only! time had really stood still in Hrabal's enchanting little town! But in fact just the broken town clock and the author's nostalgia for a more vivid but extinguished Life stood, while modernity in the form of radios and Skodas crept in, followed by the Russian army and the New Era of collectivization. That's the main point of these paired novellas, Cutting It Short & The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. Sadly, only Bohumil Hrabal's bittersweet memories truly stand still.

The narrator of Cutting It Short, Maryska, is "not a decent wife" but a wild woman, untamed and untamable, whose ankle-length sunshine hair is the glory of the town, unfurling like a banner of freedom behind her as she pedals her bicycle recklessly here and there. Her husband Francin can no more manage her than he could drive Apollo's chariot, but he loves her with intense fidelity. Francin above all aspires to be 'decent', to do his job and advance his family's station, but his wife, his brother Pepin, and eventually his son have too much joie de vivre to submit to his respectability. Maryska certainly never "stands still." She's the tidal wave of change, the first village woman to cut her skirt short and show her knees, and her model of style is Josephine Baker...!

It can't have been easy for a guy who looked like Hrabal, distinctly weather-beaten, ugly as a boot, to project the voice of a gorgeous woman narrator, and especially such a hoyden, but he did it. His Maryska is completely convincing.

Maryska's son, an eight-year-old boy, is the narrator when the story resumes in The Little Town. His tale begins with his own willful misadventure of getting a tattoo on his chest without his father's approval. The setting is sometime in the 1930s, though for the boy time does seem amorphously still; the story chiefly concerns the two brothers, Francin and Pepin. Francin is still trying to be decent, while Pepin is an archetypal madman, a carouser, a fabulator, an irrepressible lover of life. The brothers are profoundly loyal to each other, and to Maryska. As their antics unfold, the boy narrator fades more and more into the background, until his 'voice' is essentially that of an observer/author. Meanwhile, World War II rolls through town, but even occupation by the hated Germans can't repress Pepin. In fact, the 'fun' continues until the installation of the New Era of Communism, when everything both brothers represent becomes archaic and irrelevant.

The 'little town' is built around a brewery, of which Francin is the manager. Beer flows freely in amber waves through every anecdote, washing the actors in a drunken exuberance of lust for life. Life! despite any and all constraints. I visited a brewery town in Czechoslovakia - Hradec Kralove - which might have been the model for Hrabal's village. My visit was during that brief splendid interlude between the two deathly '-isms' of Communism and Tourism. My impression of the place fortifies my appreciation of Hrabal's powers of evocation. I had an awfully jolly time there, guzzling glorious beer and gobbling roast duck. The Czechs all thought I was East German and teased me mercilessly about how much more miserable things had been in "my" country than in theirs. I couldn't let them know the truth, that my passport was Swedish, since the Czechs have never forgiven the Swedes for the Thirty Years War.

By the way, hey, Swedes! I have to ask you, how come Hrabal never got the Nobel Prize? Both Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky acclaim him as the greatest Czech writer of his generation, and I agree. Hrabal's writings combine the rollicking humor of Mark Twain or Marcel Pagnol with the historical wisdom of Joseph Roth and the evocative magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Should I throw in Kafka and Kazantzakis? If you can read this book without immediately rushing to buy another Harbal, you're a different kind of reader from me.

Helo, I am Hungarian (so Molnár is my family-name). Hungary is in Central Europe too, and we were also a "red" country. Hrabal, I think, is my favorite writer. Hrabal was in his twenties when ww2 ended, and the comunists take the power. His father lost his job, the life of the hole family changed. The harmonic times ended. Hrabal was a young lawyer in these times, but he had to work at the train, couse his father was is a "too high" position in time www2. He fall in a deep depression. This book is the third of his monographic trilogy. But it's not the same. in the first and second (sorry, i don't know their english titles)there is a harmonic life in a little village, but in the third everything fall into parts. I offer, if you haven't ever read any book by hrabal, read first the firts and second part os the trilogy.

This book also contains the story "Cutting it Short" and has an introduction by Josef Skvorecky.

An engaging portrait of a small town in Bohemia in the period between world war I and II. "Cutting it Short" tells the story of Maryska, an irrepressible young woman who had the habit as a child of nearly drowning. "The Little Town Where Time Stood Still" focuses on Maryska's son as a young man who shares the same talent for stirring up trouble as his mother. Although it is not a major work, it is very satisfying to read and manages to be both moving and funny at the same time.

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