Start with Too loud a solitude. It is ninety-eight pages, it is the book Hrabal himself said he had been born to write, and it does everything he does at a scale you can finish in an evening: a wastepaper compactor operator, drunk and self-educated, describing thirty-five years of pulping banned books and rescuing some of them, in sentences that run on until they collapse.
Closely watched trains is the other legitimate starting point and is eighty-five pages — a young railway apprentice in occupied Bohemia, and the source of the Oscar-winning film. Take either first; take both inside a week.
One piece of advice that matters more here than in almost any other author path: read him slowly, and read a page or two aloud. Hrabal writes in long, digressive, drunken sentences modelled on a man talking in a pub, and the technique only becomes audible at speaking pace. Read silently and fast, the best Czech prose writer of the last century turns into a confusing one.
The big comic novels
I Served The King Of England is the most conventionally readable book on this path and the one to hand to someone who does not read translated fiction — a tiny, ambitious hotel waiter who fails his way through the Czech twentieth century, funny on nearly every page and quietly devastating by the end.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is one uninterrupted sentence for its entire length, with no full stops to rest on. It needs to be read in one or two sittings rather than twenty, because stopping in the middle of an unpunctuated book is far harder than stopping in a punctuated one. Read it after I Served The King Of England: knowing the voice makes the formal stunt readable rather than exhausting.
The Nymburk trilogy
Cutting it short is Hrabal's mother, the brewery and the small-town Bohemia of the 1920s. The little town where time stood still is the direct sequel, narrated by the son. Harlequin's millions revisits the same characters decades later, in an old people's home, and is the most beautiful thing he wrote.
Read the three in that order. One practical warning: some English editions bind Cutting it short and The little town where time stood still together in a single volume under a different title, so check what you are buying before you buy the same book twice.
The late and loose work
In-house weddings, Vita nuova and Gaps form a late trilogy narrated in the voice of his wife, and should be taken in that order. In-house weddings and Gaps read quickly. Vita nuova is the hardest thing on this path — written almost without full stops and considerably less charming than Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age — and deserves two weeks on its own.
All My Cats is a short late memoir about the cats at his country cottage and about what he did to some of them. It is much darker than the premise suggests and should be read last, when you already trust him.
Where to stop
Two books is a real Hrabal: Too loud a solitude and I Served The King Of England. Add Closely watched trains and you have under 450 pages and the whole range. The Nymburk trilogy is for readers who want the world rather than the greatest hits, and the late trilogy is for readers who have decided they love him.
It is worth knowing while you read that Hrabal wrote under censorship for most of his career, that several of these books circulated in samizdat before they were published, and that he made compromises with the authorities which Czech readers still argue about. The books do not resolve that argument and this guide will not either. More translated-fiction reading orders are on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Bohumil Hrabal Reading Order: Where to Start.
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