Bohumil Hrabal: I Served The King Of England
 

I finished I Served the King of England the other week. I'd like to give it the review it deserves, but it was baking hot and I didn't make any notes, so...

Suffice to say that while it's not quite the bulls-eye that Too Loud A Solitude is, it still kept me absolutely riveted. Like with the other Hrabals I've read, it's a microperspective of something much larger, telling the story of life in Czechoslovakia from the 1930s to the communist era from the horizon of a small and rather clueless restaurant worker; he starts as a bus boy and works his way up to manager before everything comes crashing down, and yes, the double meaning of "serve" is very deliberate.

Hrabal's comedy is anything but refined, at least on the surface; the first half is almost slapstick as he gleefully sends up the pre-war society that is still trying to pretend the old days of the Empire are still alive and well while still marvelling at new technology, and our narrator is young and selfish and learns to serve others by paying close attention to what they want and who they are; one look and he can tell exactly what they need. Then the war comes, in the middle of a sentence as if it doesn't have anything to do with him at first, and the comedy becomes increasingly dark; being a selfish sort, he picks the wrong side, falls in love with a German girl, has a tailormade Aryan baby (who turns out to be an imbecile) and sooner or later can't help but turn that sharpened sense of character perception towards himself.

I Served The King Of England ends up both as sharp social criticism (it was banned in Czechoslovakia) and as a journey of self-discovery to rival (at least my memory of) Hesse's Siddharta. Except a lot funnier. And I said to myself that during the day I would look for the road to the village, but in the evening I would write, looking for the road back, and then walk back along it and shovel away the snow that had covered my past, and so try, by writing, to ask myself about myself. He loses himself in the side stories once or twice, as any fictional autobiography will, but always with precision. I'm torn between a http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ies/4-star.gif and a http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ies/5-star.gif... pick one.

I finished this a few weeks ago. I didn't quite know what to make of it: whimsy with a strong dose of nastiness thrown in. Maybe that was the point, that in Czechoslovakia darkness always threatened any flicker of light. It's a weird and sometimes funny and sometimes vicious little book that I wouldn't recommend to anyone, really, but was certainly not without merit. I liked closing chapters in the prison camp and finally, movingly even, in isolation in the mountains. Before reading this I'd only known Hrabal as the screenwriter of two Jiri Menzel movies (two of the best movies of the Czech New Wave, or anywhere for that matter in the 1960s): Closely Watched Trains and Larks on a String. These movies both have darkness rippling beneath them - the latter is set in a prison camp - but it's never too explicit. I Served the King of England sees the author at times becoming overwhelmed by despair.

I watched Jiri Menzel's adaptation of I Served The King Of England yesterday. Not a bad film at all, it stays (for the most part) very faithful to the book and manages to capture both Hrabal's bawdy humour - and it is very funny - and his more bitter observations. Some really good performances as well. Unfortunately, Menzel is a little too fond of voice-overs, and while the cinematography is simply beautiful, that becomes a bit of a problem when Menzel starts fetishizing naked women as much as his main character does. I'm not entirely sure he tied together the actions of young Dite and the philosophies of old Dite as well as he might have, either. But hey, it works, and it's worth a watch, even if it's not nearly as good as the book. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ies/3-star.gif

I read this around the same time as Josef Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls, and found them complementary.

(Apparently, so did the translator.)

See, Menzel is one of those guys whose movies no one has really seen since the late 1960s. Bad sign. All of a sudden, nearly 40 years later, he's making a movie based on a book by the guy on whose books he based his last really great movies so long ago. To me it sounds like a filmmaker desperately trying to regain some former prestige (most reviews of King of England I've read seem to verify that). Sometimes, for whatever reason, an artist just loses his touch. There are a number of great examples in film: Preston Sturges, Jancso Miklos, Robert Altman, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami. These guys, like Menzel, when they were cooking on all four burners, were real masters of their medium. But the tendency is to burn bright for 10-15 years and then... nothing. I highly recommend anyone seek out Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (in the UK Closely Observed Trains) and Larks on a String. Two very, very great and beautiful movies.