Bohumil Hrabal (new translation) The Long Sentence....

[ish mailian]

Nostalgic tall tale telling from the high chair....yes, a good source
of amazing plots, characters, dialogue even, but the images, the
mixing of plots and images, the absurd beauty, the weaving of themes,
somehow I doubt that the boys at the pub deserve credit for
these.....there again, the gin mill does spin yarns....fantastic and
entertaining.


On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 6:52 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, Ish,I did go to my local university library
> and they had one Hrabal. The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (and other stories),
> 1975 Dday [Czech 1966]
> with a nice intro by a friend and fellow writer Daniel Miritz who describes
> meeting him when they were both young and unpublished--Miritz worked
> in a publishing company and had to throw away unused proofs and galleys
> and one day he met a guy who got them out to the dumpster, said they were
> interesting when they chatted, then they met with other unpublished writers
> to read and discuss work, reminding me of that group of poets in Bolano's
> Savage Detectives except they called themselves Visceral Realists but in
> Hrabal's Czechoslovakia they had to push realism out for their style of
> surrealism,
> or whatever we call it or reminding of any young group of writers such as
> the Beats
> .......but all of this is just a bonus I throw in because all I wanted
> to post was this line from the author's intro Handbook for the Apprentice
> Palaverer [nice, yes?]
>
> "I do not see myself myself as a rosary but as a broken chain of laughter,
> the most fragile bead
> determines the limits of my prodigal imagination, something in me has been
> castrated, something that
> both exists here and now and is retreating into the past, so as to be
> catapulted arclike into a future
> that keeps shrinking away from my hungry lips and eyes, which then makes me
> squint
> and look at things with the double vision of the Icelandic limestone, today
> is yesterday and
> the day before yesterday is the day after tomorrow.     [emphasis mine]
>
> ICELANDIC SPAR! here, as a metaphor in 1966!  Wonderful.
>
> PS HRABAL'S friend recounts delightfully how, when he got a bit famous--his
> Closely Watched Trains got
> made into a movie--his bar buddies stopped talking to him, he claimed,
> saying, he listens to all our
> stories then goes and writes them and gets rich and we get nothing..."i'm
> ruined, Hrabal claimed at the time.
>
> Closely Watched Trains I remember as a warm wonderful movie which I MUST see
> again. Now.
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 7:32 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> as is Prague
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 8:38 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> His imagery is astounding,  strange and absurd and beautiful.
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l