The Little Town Where Time Stood Still


Book Description

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer.” “Cutting It Short” is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Maryška, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Maryška drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. She’s a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The Little Town Where Time Stood Still” is told by Maryška and Francin’s son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new post–World War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life. Together, Hrabal’s rousing and outrageous yarns stand as a hilarious and heartbreaking tribute to the always imperiled sweetness of lust, love, and life.




The Little Town Where Time Stood Still


Book Description

'Folks, life is beautiful! Bring on the drinks, I'm sticking around till I'm ninety! Do you hear?' A young boy grows up in a sleepy Czech community where little changes. His raucous, mischievous Uncle Pepin came to stay with the family years ago, and never left. But the outside world is encroaching on their close-knit town - first in the shape of German occupiers, and then with the new Communist order. Elegiac and moving, Bohumil Hrabal's gem-like portrayal of the passing of an age is filled with wit, life and tenderness. 'What is unique about Hrabal is his capacity for joy' Milan Kundera 'Even in a town where nothing happens, Hrabal's meticulous and exuberant fascination with the human voice insists that, as long as there's still breath in a body, life is endlessly eventful' Independent




The Little Town Where Time Stood Still


Book Description

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer.” “Cutting It Short” is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Maryška, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Maryška drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. She’s a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The Little Town Where Time Stood Still” is told by Maryška and Francin’s son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new post–World War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life. Together, Hrabal’s rousing and outrageous yarns stand as a hilarious and heartbreaking tribute to the always imperiled sweetness of lust, love, and life.




Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age


Book Description

Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life—or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like “in the days of the monarchy” and how they’ve changed since. As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Hrabal, one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century, as well as an inveterate haunter of Prague’s pubs and football stadiums, developed a unique method which he termed “palavering,” whereby characters gab and soliloquize with abandon. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, this astonishing novel (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why he has earned the admiration of such writers as Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich.




Cutting It Short


Book Description

Set in small-town Bohemia between the wars, Cutting It Short centres on the flamboyant and unpredictable Maryska, who loves food and prepares endless feasts. Until one day she scandalises the town when she cuts short her golden tresses, leading to a small revolution in gender roles.




Gibeon, Where the Sun Stood Still


Book Description

This first book-length presentation of the results of our excavations at el-Jib has been written for the general reader who is concerned with the contribution that archaeology has made to the biblical history of the site.... In telling the story of Gibeon I have tried to show how the tale of the city unfolded week by week and year by year through excavation and study. I have sought to give in these pages a personally conducted tour, as it were, of the ruins of ancient Gibeon and what we have seen in them.... The results of the excavations at el-Jib are unique in that they can be related with a high degree of certainty to specific events described in the Old Testament. For the first time in the history of scientific archaeology in the land of the Bible an actual place name of a biblical city, neatly incised on clay, has been found under circumstances which make certain the identification of the name with the ruins.--from the Preface




All My Cats


Book Description

A literary master’s story about the aggravations and great joys of cats, from “a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humor and a hushed tenderness of detail” (Julian Barnes) In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in Kersko. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and his country retreat, where he wrote and tended to a community of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and more complex, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer. All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is a confessional memoir, the chronicle of an author who becomes overwhelmed. As he is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas created by his indulgent love for the animals, there are episodes of intense brutality as he controls the feline population. Yet in the end, All My Cats is a book about Hrabal’s relationship to nature, about the unlikely sources of redemption that come to him unbidden, like a gift from the cosmos—and about love.




When Time Stood Still


Book Description

Our lives are spent watching the clock. We go to sleep by it. Wake up to it. Rely on it. Race it.It's easy to forget that we're only given so much.We ignore it because we're convinced we'll always have more.I am proof that we aren't promised anything.The clock owes us nothing.I know this because not only was Time my name, I wasn't given enough of it.Sure I had challenges but I vowed to make the most of it, of my young life.My limitations wouldn't hold me back.Time was on my side.Then I was told otherwise.Now the clock was working against me.I would face this disease alone.Then he walked in and changed everything.He gave me a reason to fight.He helped me prepare.Like others before me, when time slowed I wasn't ready.I begged for more.But the clock, it stopped for no one.On the day my world went black, I refused to take him with me.Only he didn't listen.I was a doctor.A bringer of bad news.I read the chart.She was fucked.My hands, they were tied.I was a doctor who could not heal what was beyond that door.I had no hope to offer her.But I wanted this over with.The sooner the better.I walked in, looked up and saw color.Not one.All of them.They surrounded her.She was a patient.You did not cross that line.I would not cross that line.I should have kept my eyes closed.Life was easier when you didn't see.But they were open now.They saw her.They saw everything.Suddenly invisible lines ceased to matter.For me, Time mattered.How far would you go to make sure the one you loved had enough of it?Would you challenge the clock?Help them prepare?Could you watch them suffer?Could you accept a life without them in it?Or, would you follow them into the darkness?I did. This is our story.




I Served the King of England


Book Description

Chronicles the experiences of Ditie, who rises from busboy to hotel owner in World War II Prague, and whose life is shaped by the fate of his country before, during, and after the conflict.




Underlined While Reading-3


Book Description

I was born in December 1954 or January 1955 (‘when the first snow fell’) as the third child of a Kurdish family living in a remote village of Eastern Turkey. My father died of tuberculosis at the age of 31 when I was six years old. My mother was 34, never married again, dedicated her life to her children. From the moment I learned how to read and write I became a passionate reader of the books; books of literature, books of history, books of travel, books of philosophy, books of memoirs, books of biographies, books of politics… This book contains some of the excerpts that I noted while reading. Excerpts of wisdom and reflection from Barack Obama to Haji Ali (Nurmadhar of Korphe Village in Karakoram) from Edward Gibbon to Abdul Sattar Edhi (Pakistani Philanthropist). Excerpts on life, on love, on humanity, on civilization, on courage, on art, on ideas, on faith, on democracy, on freedom, on nations, on education, on war, on peace... Just a few short examples: For only in death are we alone-Rabindranath Tagore *** Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness-Samuel Jonson *** Serious literature is no less of a life preserver, even if the society is all but oblivious of it-Philip Roth *** It bothers me a little that at 99 you’re going to die any minute, because I have a lot of other things I want to do-Delmer Berg Sezai Arli Doha, November 2020