I Served the King of England

This month's book for Savidge Reads' and Kimbofo's book group was I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. This Czech book in translation was my choice. I first came across Hrabal six years ago when I took a Slavonic literature course as an elective at University and read his novella Closely Observed Trains; I would like to reread it as all I can remember of the somewhat bizarre book is that Milos, the apprentice signalman, had attempted suicide after the humiliation of his first sexual experience. I Served the King of England had been on my radar at that time but I promptly forgot about it until coming across it whilst working in a bookshop last Christmas and then it featured in the comedy section of The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. The entry for the book, written my Joanna Hines, caught my imagination:

Ditie, the hero of Hrabal's comic masterpiece, learns early in his career to keep his ears open without hearing, keep his eyes open without seeing. From busboy he progresses to become a waiter in a Prague hotel, and then a millionaire with a hotel of his own; but his personal parameters remain those of the small man. Building on the rambling style of Hasek's Svejk, the novel's humour and bathos achieve universal significance in the contrast between Ditie's meagre resources and his eternally grandiose ambition.

I was curious whether the comedy would translate and it did, albeit perhaps not as well as it may have in the original Czech (although credit to the translator Paul Wilson who has translated Hrabal who, the Czechs say, is "untranslatable"). The important thing to take note of from the synopsis above is "his personal parameters remain those of the small man" because Ditie -which means "child"- is a small man, complete with small man issues; an interesting hero in himself but especially with the backdrop of WWII where megalomaniac dictators with their own small man issues wreaked horror on the "sub"-man. Ditie is reminded by his first manager that as a busboy "you don't see anything and you don't hear anything ... But remember too that you've got to see everything and hear everything". Hrabal, via Ditie, then shows us everything in an overly descriptive first part of the novel. Ditie's escapades -because they can only really be called that- are ludicrous and at times hilarious. In his first job Ditie saves his money to visit Paradise's, the local brothel, so he can have his first sexual encounter. The novel becomes quite lewd, surprisingly so, at this point and Ditie lavishes a cast of prostitutes with visits, attention, and a lap-full of flowers (hence the fabulous cover of the newly re-issued edition from Vintage Books).

Described accurately as a "novel of two halves" by Polly of Novel Insights, the first part of I Served the King of England is a lighthearted expose of the hotel industry with some very amusing -and detailed- descriptions of the tricks of the trade; the second half, however, takes on a far more serious subject matter albeit still with an irreverent tone. The juxtaposition of the horrific German occupation of the now Czech Republic and the subsequent Blitzkrieg, the unbelievable coming true, with the comically farcical is superbly done. Hrabal injects black humour into the unimaginably abhorrent and I found myself chuckling uproariously at the most shocking of moments, that in a straight novel would be far from humorous (moments that in The Glass Room by Simon Mawer were uncomfortably haunting). To share Hrabal's achievement and to demonstrate the style of writing, I have shared a scene where Ditie goes for German testing to see if he is fit to mate with an Aryan woman:

And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German--which I couldn't understand, though I got the gist well enough--when some stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb.

Ditie is then presented with pornography and when that doesn't arouse him is masturbated by the nurse. Hrabal certainly knows how to create an image and one that doesn't jar but does make an impact in its ridiculousness.

As a group we were mainly ambivalent towards this book and even after discussion most of us could not make up our minds what we felt about it; none of us hated it and Linda even loved it and saw qualities in it that many of us missed but we were not jumping up and down eagerly in our seats or agreeing that it is a novel that everyone must read. I am glad however that I have read it as I had been meaning to and in reading the very informative introduction by Adam Thirwell, I appreciate it the more. I will leave you with one passage of his, where he certainly sees the profound in I Served the King of England:

A sense of humour, in Hrabal, is really a sense of proportion: the ability to diminish the things of the world to their true and miniature size. This, in the end, is the real way to be a hedonist: to be content with how small the world's pleasures are, to be happy with humiliation. But this sense of proportion is so rare.
Ditie's diminutive stature, which leads him to try to impose himself on the world in such grandiose ways, is really metaphysical. It is universal. For everyone it is miniature, but with grandiose ambitions. So everyone is laughable.