I served the King of England

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.