Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his
worldview from a dry cleaner's slip he came across in Prague, which warned
clients "Some stains can only be removed by the destruction of the
material itself." Unknown until he was in his fifties, banned on and off by the Communists, Hrabal had ample opportunity to hone his sense of life's absurdity, a perspective on life specialized in by the Czechs and the Irish (or perhaps I should say the Slavs and the Celts). Another shrewd observation from the author of Closely Watched Trains was "It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls." And in Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, Hrabal plays the note of absurdity to perfection in this brief anecdote:
"My cousin was a twin and a real card, he was christened Vincek and his brother was christened Ludvicek, and when they were a year old their mother was bathing them in a tub and popped out to a see a neighbor, and when she got back half an hour later one of them had drowned, and they were so much alike nobody could tell which one, Ludvicek or Vincek, so they flipped a coin, heads for Ludvicek, tails for Vincek, and it came up Ludvicek, but when my cousin Vincek grew up he began to wonder - and he had plenty of time for it, he was always out of a job - he began to wonder who really did drown, whether the person walking around on earth wasn't really Ludvicek and he, Vincek, was up in heaven, which led him to drink and to wander along the water's edge and go in swimming, testing the waters, so to speak, till at last he drowned, by way of proof that he hadn't been the one to drown back then."
Like Mozart's music, Hrabal's fiction contains all the bitterness and exaltation of life, episodic sunlight in the dark shadow of fate. He died in 1997 at the age of 82 when he leaned too far out of a fifth-floor window to feed pigeons. Or maybe he jumped; fifth-floor windows, and suicides therefrom, figure prominently in his fiction. We'll never know.
