Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 1964

An unnamed narrator holds forth to a group of ladies he obviously wants to impress on matters such as marital strife, dream symbolism, personal hygeine, crooks, barmaids, balalaikas, unlikely personal dalliances and anything else that comes to mind, all in one rambling, tumbling, obscenely long and unfinished sentence that’s clearly meant to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. As with other books by Hrabal (for instance the bizarrely worthwhile Too Loud a Solitude and Closely Observed Trains), Hrabal’s linear momentum becomes rather effortless once you get into his awkward rhythm: the oddness of what he’s describing is somehow shaken off and the reader can indulge this vainglorious character all the way. As book-length, comic self-portraits go this is excellent, and Hrabal’s self-imposed task of writing an entire book in a single sentence was clearly a constraint he could also turn into something of a liberation.  PY

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Bruce Chatwin, Utz, 1988

Chatwin was often brought to book for his over-embellishment of the lives of living people so it’s likely that the slippery character of the late Czechoslovakian porcelain collector Kaspar Utz has been subjected to the same fate, though this time it seems Chatwin is a little more careful to conceal his characters’ real identities. Utz was a man of a minor European nobility, figuratively imprisoned by his collection of rare Messein porcelain, and Chatwin ultimately portrays him as a rather sad figure. It’s hard to tell the degree of artistic licence he took with his last novel, but certainly there are passages in which he lets his imagination take flight about Utz’s annual visits to Vichy in France. It’s also a cautionary tale for collectors of whatever stripe and there’s no denying it reads exceptionally well too, whatever amount of fictionalising Chatwin may have indulged in. Recommended.   PY

•  Utz was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize.

Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Observed Trains, 1965

In 1945 a young railway signalman with a death wish, Milos Hrma, works at a small but strategic Bohemian station, but however straightforward his job may be it’s complicated by his own set of small concerns, such as the matter of dispatching German troops to their crumbling Eastern Front, or the minor scandal involving the station’s female telegraphist, or losing his virginity, or the small part he will soon play in disposing of a German ammunition train. It’s cleverly comedic in the way that the endless trains of death and misery that pass through Hrma’s station are only briefly acknowledged while Hrma’s own lesser preoccupations always take centre stage. Like another of Hrabal’s rather unique books, Too Loud a Solitude, this was initially difficult to find a way into, but once the rhythm of it becomes apparent it is full of earthy humour and some joyously sardonic writing.  PY

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