Book review: Mr. Kafka and Other Tales From the Time of the Cult – an uncovered Czech treasure

A newly translated trove of stories captures a country in the middle of Stalinist upheaval. Our reviewer finds them funny and engrossing.

Wenceslas Square, Prague, Czechoslovakia, looking towards the National Museum. Three Lions / Getty Images

Bohumil Hrabal, arguably the greatest of all Czech writers, would have been 101 this year. He died in 1997, leaving behind some of the finest, liveliest and most original fiction of the 20th century. His major novels, including Closely Observed Trains, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, and Too Loud a Solitude, were published in samizdat editions in the 1960s and 1970s, and went on to become available to English readers in his lifetime. However, when Hrabal died, a lot of his lesser, though still vital, books had yet to be translated.

In recent years there has been a concerted effort from smaller, pluckier publishers to raid the vault and bring those remaining texts to anglophone readers. The latest to appear comes courtesy of New York-based publisher, New Directions. Originally published in Czech in 1965, Mr Kafka and Other Tales From the Time of the Cult is a collection of short stories, now neatly translated by Paul Wilson. They were written in the 1950s as a response to the social and political havoc that was being unleashed by Czech Stalinists. All seven tales thrum with Hrabal's characteristic rambunctious energy and are tinged with flurries of comic absurdity and ghoulish mayhem.

The first, eponymous story comprises a madcap day in the life of a Mr Kafka. He isn’t Franz (“I’m always being mistaken for someone else”), and his phantasmagorical tour of the streets of Prague is more Hrabalian than Kafkaesque. On his travels he encounters all sorts – philosophers, prostitutes, policemen – spots a streetcar carrying dangling dead men and is constantly spellbound by women. At one point there is mention of another familiar name. “Hey, Kafka!” someone hollers. “When’s your Uncle Adolf going to die again? Seems he’s been passing away in instalments.”

Readers expecting gritty realism will be disappointed. "I exorcise reality," Hrabal wrote in an introduction to an earlier collection of stories. "I am a corresponding member of the Academy of Palavery." We witness his customary "palavering" – a trait that fellow Czech writer Josef Škvorecký defined as "surreal raconteurism" – in the strongest story here, "Broken Drum". Once again set in Prague, it features a candid cinema usher (or "honest-to-goodness ticket-taker") who gets promoted and branches out into theatres, concerts and public lecture halls. His cheery, freewheeling, first-person ramblings put us in mind of Ditie, the equally jovial and garrulous narrator of Hrabal's charming novel I Served the King of England. Long, unfurling sentences and unbroken paragraphs describe an open-air concert and chart the escalating tension between rival groups of classical and popular musicians. That tension builds to a riotous crescendo involving a brawl, smashed instruments and the strangest possible form of "salvation".

While all these stories come smudged with Hrabal’s fingerprints, a handful of them show him toning down or reining in his trademark bawdy, picaresque elements and instead introducing darker humour and scenes of a more disquieting nature. Both “Betrayal of Mirrors” and “Ingots” consist of two alternating narratives, with one story containing subtle political critiques and the other culminating in a rape. “Angel” takes the form of a sober exchange between a female prisoner and a guard who is really, literally, more of a guardian angel. And “Strange People” and “Beautiful Poldi” play out on the factory floor of the Poldi steelworks where Hrabal once worked – the former offering a peek into the disparate lives of a ragtag team of striking workers; the latter a bittersweet tale about knuckling down in the present and glancing fondly back at the past.

Taken as a whole, these stories are by no means vintage Hrabal, nor are they a patch on his novels. That said, there are many pockets of brilliance to keep us entranced and amused, from old magic to new tricks. Only Hrabal could have invented a character who praises Prague’s statues not for their beauty but for providing him with “a marble or a sandstone arm to lean on” when staggering home drunk.

“Everything exists in the elasticity of perspective,” Hrabal tells us, “and life itself is illusion, deformation, perspective.” A satisfyingly warped perspective is on display here; such is Hrabal’s fictive world. Ultimately this collection may be more should-read than must-read, but on practically every page there is evidence of a unique mind at work.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh.