Bohumil hrabal biography of williams syndrome

What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence?

Hrabal explores the intricacies of class disparity, the servants to the rich ruling class, and even the Czech way of life under the Nazi rule.

Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man that slight vibration of a swagger , grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism. It hints at a man whose sense of himself has so swelled that he now sees himself geographically, like a darkened area experiencing a bout of low pressure on a weather-map of Europe.

Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence by the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who died in There is Hanta, the narrator of Too Loud a Solitude , who has been compacting waste for 35 years, and educating himself on the sly using the great books he rescues from the trash. And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England , a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England.

Svejk is a kind of Sancho Panza, living on into an age that is no longer epic, not even comic. Since he has always wanted nothing more than to be a millionaire, he goes to the police, bank statements in hand, to argue that he should be immediately taken in. He is, though not without some effort on his part. Like Hasek, Hrabal kept his ear close to the pub table.

He sat for hours in his favourite Prague establishment, the Golden Tiger, listening to beer-fed stories foam. You were as likely to find him maybe smiling shyly in the already slightly drunk crowd at a Third Division football game as overhear him commenting on the game quoting Immanuel Kant or another of his philosophical gods.

Bohumil Hrabal () is a Czech writer considered as one of the best Czech writers of the 20th century.

Hrabal, who was born in in Moravia, started writing poems under the influence of French Surrealism. The poems quickly squared their shoulders and became paragraphs: prose poems, epiphanic jottings, broken anecdotes. The Prague Revue No. You were weeping, I too was weeping and the tubby landlady was weeping.