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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rise, Fall, Redemption of a 'Little' Man, 23 Jul 2004
Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England is a beautiful, sparse, simply told story about a little man named Ditie. Ditie is a little man in the sense that he is small in stature. He is also little in the sense that he is merely a waiter, a little man who wanders blithely through the critical historical events that buffeted Czechoslovakia between 1935 and 1950 or so. As the novel opens Ditie is a busboy at the Golden Prague Hotel. On his first day the hotel manager pulls him by the left ear to advise him to "remember, you don't see anything and you don't hear anything." The manager then pulls him by the right ear and tells him that he has "to see everything and hear everything." Ditie manages to learn how to accomplish this seemingly irreconcilable task. Ditie is an ambitious man whose ambitions focus on acquiring two things: money and 'sensuous' experiences. His life is otherwise void of conscious thought or awareness. In many respects Hrabal portrays him vividly as something less than a complete human being. He earns money on the side selling frankfurters at the local train station. He gains extra tips from passengers ordering frankfurters from the train by fumbling for change long enough for the train to pull out. He decides to become a millionaire after walking into a room to see a portly Czech salesman rolling around on a floor covered with money. Ditie's hunger for sensual experiences is fueled after his first visit to the local brothel, the aptly named Paradise. After his first visit Ditie vows to make so much money that he can continue to explore the delights found there. Hrabal's description of Ditie's introduction to the lure of money and flesh is both comic and delightful. Ditie leaves the Golden Prague Hotel and makes his way to the Hotel Tichota and then the Hotel Paris where he is promoted to waiter. It is there that he is taken under the wing of the headwaiter Mr. Skrivánek, who knows everything there is to know about being a top waiter. Whenever Ditie asks Skrivánek how he knows a particular fact Skrivánek replies - "because I served the King of England" at a banquet many years ago. Ditie later reaches one of his life's highpoints when he gets to serve the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. He then gets to answer "I served the Emperor of Ethiopia" whenever a younger waiter asks him for advice. The description of the banquet is another wonderful example of Hrabal's story telling ability. It is while at the Hotel Paris that Ditie meets and falls in love with a young Sudeten German named Lise. As noted, Ditie is unaware or unfazed by the political events that are in the front of everyone else's mind. He is shocked that his fellow waiters ostracize him because of his relationship with Lise merely because of the troubles in the Sudetenland and the pending German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ditie merely wants to become a millionaire and make love to Lise. Ditie is fired shortly before the German invasion. The story takes us through Ditie's life during the war and up through the Communist accession to power in Czechoslovakia. At every step of the way these events swirl around Ditie without seeming to touch him in any real way. He spends a six month term in jail after the war for his collaboration with the Germans but that does not interfere with his plans to open up a spectacular hotel and become a millionaire. Ditie accomplishes this goal just around the time of the Communist accession to power in Czechoslovakia. Again, this does not seem to have any real impact on Ditie at all. In fact, when it is announced that the new regime will impose a horrendous tax on all millionaires Ditie eagerly awaits the validation that paying this tax will accord him. Instead he is horrified when an old colleague, a member of the Czech resistance who later becomes a party leader, whose life Ditie inadvertently saved from the Gestapo manages to obtain a tax exemption for Ditie. Horrified, Ditie marches to the local police with his bankbook to prove he is a millionaire. Of course all his assets are taken and he is sent to a work camp in the mountains. It is only after Ditie has lost everything that he achieves some sense of his own humanity. It is a redemption that Ditie probably never knew he needed. As the story ends, Ditie wants nothing more than to be buried on the very top of a particular hill so that part of his remains make their way into some streams in Bohemia and the other part make their way into the Danube. Although it is certainly easy to set out the events in I Served the King of England it is hard to convey the beauty and the comedy of Hrabal's writing. Hrabal's writing style is something of an anecdotal, stream of consciousness storytelling. It reminds me of the times I would sit in a bar, pub, or café in some far away place and come across someone who simply knew how to tell great stories. They might be a tad drunk, they might have told those stories to anyone willing to buy them a pint or too. But they are fun to listen to and sometimes they tell you a little bit about the storyteller and a little about yourself. Hrabal's I Served the King of England is one of those stories. It is a delightful book.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A delight from start to end, 31 Jul 2006
A superbly gifted linguist, Hrabal had a unique and almost untranslatable way with his language - dubbed "Hrabalovstina" by his contemporaries - but this English translation of arguably his best work is absolutely perfect. It follows the comic capers of Ditie as he struggles against class and expectation in Nazi-occupied Prague. Tender and brash, this is a novel of countless wonderful intricacies.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I was always lucky in my bad luck.", 3 Jul 2007
First published and distributed secretly during the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, this tragicomic novel by Bohumil Hrabal is a first-person account by Ditie, a teenage busboy at a rural hotel who progresses to waiter, and eventually to successful hotel owner before his fall when the communists take over. The picaresque plot serves as the framework for a series of often hilarious stories about the people Ditie works with, the lives they have led, the values they maintain, their hopes for the future, and the sometimes large chasm between their dreams and reality.
Set in rural hotels, in German camps during their occupation of Czechoslovakia, and in Prague, where Ditie served, not the King of England, but Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the novel concludes at the "end of the road," where Ditie resides with his horse, goat, and cat, living on his memories and writing his autobiography--this book.
Ditie is a charming story-teller, using the casual, almost innocent language of a young boy at the beginning and becoming philosophical and contemplative by the end. Hrabal's sensitivity to small details and his accurate depiction of real people responding to real situations in sometimes odd and often darkly humorous ways make this sometimes satiric novel a delight to read. Ribald and rowdy in his descriptions of his own sexual awakening and in the stories of his customers' peccadillos, Ditie maintains his dignity when he describes the important people with whom he comes into contact--the headwaiter who "served the King of England," the President of Czechoslovakia, and eventually Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, for whom Ditie is personal waiter.
The novel takes a new, darker turn, when Ditie marries a German woman and leaves Prague to live in the mountains--at a breeding station the Germans have established to develop a "refined race of humans." Lise, his wife, travels widely for the Reich, once returning from Warsaw with a suitcase full of valuable stamps, confiscated from Jews, which guarantee their financial future. Their lives are less secure, however, and Ditie eventually dissociates himself from the Germans and tries to re-establish a life of his own, this time as the owner of a Czech hotel built with the proceeds from the sale of the stamps.
By turns hilarious and poignant, satiric and sensitive, the novel depicts many aspects of Czech society and culture, but it is, above all, the story of Ditie, in many ways a Czech everyman. With symbolism throughout, and a repeating character, Zdenek, the headwaiter who "served the King of England," who appears at every crossroads in Ditie's life, the novel is more than a comic romp. A record of a time, place, and culture, it is also Ditie's meditation on his life and his role, if any, in the wider world. Soon to be released as a major film by Academy Award-winning Czech director Jiri Menzel, who also directed the film version of Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains, this novel deserves to find a wide, long-overdue audience. Mary Whipple
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