An old roué, Jirka, a retired shoemaker, in one breathless address, often course and absurd, is regaling some young ladies and tells them of another group of young ladies he also used to habitually address, six prostitutes (his ‘beauties’) out sunbathing in their back garden. He told them story after tall story, hilarious, incredible, credible, about people he knew, or quoting books on marital bliss, sexual hygiene and the meaning of dreams. Seemingly with some nostalgia for the days of the monarchy, he is giving them “windows on the world”, the benefit of his broad experience, though his commentary also reveals traits of misogyny and anti-Semitism.
I love Bohumil Hrabal. This little classic, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced In Age, of just over one hundred pages, was first published in 1964. Hrabal, who was Czech, died in 1997 at the age of eighty two. He fell from the fifth floor of a hospital window and it was probably an act of suicide. Indeed, the theme of suicide, murder and violent death surfaces regularly through Dancing Lessons.
Here are some extracts:
“My cousin was a twin and a real card, he was christened Vincek and his brother was christened Ludvicek, and when they were a year old their mother was bathing them in a tub and popped out to a see a neighbour, and when she got back half an hour later one of them had drowned, and they were so much alike nobody could tell which one, Ludvicek or Vincek, so they flipped a coin, heads for Lucvicek, tails for Vincek, and it came up Ludvicek, but when my cousin Vincek grew up he began to wonder – and he had plenty of time for it, he was always out of a job – he began to wonder who really did drown, whether the person walking around on earth wasn’t really Ludvicek and he, Vincek, was up in heaven, which led him to drink and to wander along the water’s edge and go in swimming, testing the waters, so to speak, till at last he drowned, by way of proof that he hadn’t been the one to drown back then.”
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“a goldsmith once beat a bulldog by mistake and that bulldog never forgot it, and one day the goldsmith was brushing the dog and it jumped up and bit him in the neck, and with the fangs still in his neck he dragged himself over to his desk and pulled out a gun, but he aimed in the mirror and missed and hit his own ear instead.”
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“poor Pushkin, to die in a duel, and so young, his last poems gushing from the bullet hole in his head, I could tell from the picture that he admired the European Renaissance too…”
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“in the days of the monarchy long hair was less important than big busts, there were women who had to wear rucksacks filled with bricks to keep from toppling over, they were really something those bosoms, from morning till night the monarchy thought of nothing but bosoms, the bra stuffing that went on! Having a daughter with breasts smaller than beer bottles was a family tragedy, it’s making a comeback now, by the way, you’re starting to see the build you saw then…”
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“It’s interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.”
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“our priest had the misfortune of finding a boy going at it with a girl one night next to the church, at first he was afraid it was a parish priest, but it wasn’t, anyway, he reported it.”
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As, Jirka, tells his ‘beauties’, “some memory I’ve got, eh, young ladies?”
One of the funniest writers, ever.