Harlekins millioner

Part III of Hrabal's autobiography/biography of his mother, that started with Cutting It Short (I've yet to find Part II in translation) is more of the same: at times hilarious in the way it trips, slapstick-like over itself to find the time to tell all the stories it wants to tell, and at times filled with grief for that which has gone and will never come again.

She is old now, and together with Francin and his senile brother Pepin they've checked into a retirement home; it used to be a castle belonging to a nobleman, but of course this is the CSSR and there are no noblemen anymore. (They'd wanted to spend their autumn years travelling the world and even saved up the money for it, but of course they don't get to do that now.) With Hrabal's amazing gift for imagery, the old castle becomes both a mirror of the big world outside (the old people guard the gates themselves, unable to recognize friend from foe as long as they're on duty) and the setting for the stories that the three oldest inhabitants of the home tell to her: everyone that lived in the little town down there, everything they did, stories going back 50, 100, 200, 400 years. And in Hrabal's prose, all of these times and themes mingle and mirror each other. For instance, there's a breathtaking scene in which the narrator describes dinner time at the home, with 400 decrepit and toothless old people reflecting a huge painting of Alexander the Great defeating the Persians, that the old Count had put on the ceiling of the dining room. Knives clash against plates as the new world sweeps away the old, the huge but outdated Persian army being bested by the streamlined and modernised Greeks, while outside the walls of the castle (Masque of the Red Death, anyone?) new thoughts and styles are not only replacing the old ones but even, as is often the case, even the memories of the old ones.

The teeth she was tricked into replacing with false teeth she couldn't wear; the gravestones that the caterpillars like giant dentists rip up at the local cemetary to turn it into a park, carting away all the old stones - the only witnesses remaining that these people ever existed. The stories that the three oldest men tell her of times gone by that often get told twice - always a little fancier the second time around; this is both an exercise in and an indictment of nostalgia. The only way to keep memories alive is to keep telling stories of them, but the stories tend to get idealised over time and turn into fiction. A lot of times, things were better in the old days because we tell ourselves they were.

The shops that used to have first and last names had transformed into Meat and the department store Unity, Restaurant and Bread and pastries, Café and Motors. I smiled and was happy that I'd gotten to see with my own eyes how times had changed, how almost all of the old people had passed away and been replaced by young women and young men, everything was different from before.

And of course, the subtitle to the whole book is "A Fairytale." Because we cannot really trust anything we remember; man (and, I suppose in this case, woman) likes to mythologise, likes to fill in the blanks and make sense of what we remember, improve on it.

In every room in the retirement home, where the old people live bunched together, 8 to a bedroom, there's a loudspeaker playing the Harlequinade (that's the book's title); that sentimental ballet music you hear over a thousand silent movies, as if to keep the old people stuck in their nostalgia and not look at the world around them. The narrator and her three companions find a way out by telling stories of what they've seen: keeping themselves alive by keeping the past alive, by not forgetting the good and the bad, not buying into the mandatory conformity. Not all of the memories are happy, not all of them are even all that fascinating; but hey, that's Life - and in the hands of Hrabal, even the dullest stories take on all five senses, right up until the ending knocks us all flat on our backs.