Closely Watched Trains (European Classics)
by Bohumil Hrabal
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bohumil HrabalTranslator: Edith Pargeter
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1995-03-09
ISBN: 0810112787
Number of pages: 85
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Book Reviews of Closely Watched Trains (European Classics)
Book Review: Heroism in a Tragicomic Key
Summary: 4 Stars
American and English readers will, if they are of a certain age, remember the film adaptation of this novella in the mid-1960's. Perhaps they saw it at a student film festival or in a local "art-house" which specialized in showing foreign films (and it was a great era for films from France, Sweden, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland - I apologize if I have slighted the cinematic prominence of other nations in that heady time.) Hrabal wrote the screenplay for the film as well. This took place during the several years of liberalizing ferment within Czechoslovakia that culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968, a burst of optimism that was to be quickly squashed like an unwelcome insect.
So the novella is known through both its film version and several English-language editions which have been published intermittently during the past forty years. The story is one of youthful heroism blossoming in the local context of everyday activities, but also in the increasingly desperate overall political and military context of the last months of World War II, when it seemed that the Protectorate might be used by the Germans to throw up a suicidal, last-ditch defense against its converging enemies. With the exception of the narrator's recollection of meaningful events in his young life, the entire story takes place within the confines of a railway station where its major characters are employees of the state's railway service. (The station and its employees are a fictional re-creation of the train station at Kostomlaty - a small town near Nymburk, Hrabal's hometown -- where the author worked during the war. He reveals this and the genesis of two of the book's major scenes in "November Hurricane", one of nine autobiographical essays in the collection "Total Fears. Letters to Dubenka", published posthumously in an English translation in 1998.)
As well as a hero's tale the story is also a sexual comedy, with its farcical central episode of Dispatcher Hubicka's imprinting official railroad stamps on the charming buttocks of telegraphist Virginia Svata. This deed has hilarious implications and results - photographs of Virginia's decorated buttocks are circulating, and based on these there is a promise of a film career for the young woman. A ridiculous railroad administrative inquisition takes place in order to establish the legality of such an act. At the same time Stationmaster Lansky, who heartily disapproves of the behavior of his underlings, is being petitioned by the local aristocracy to introduce Hubicka to them socially - he is a man after their own hearts. (A minor point: While her last name is "Saint", J. Skvorecky points out in his Introduction that Virginia is not an apt translation of her first name, Zdenicka. He may have missed a tricky bilingual etymological boat here, since the prototype of Zdenicka is probably Saint Denise, celebrated for the staunch defense of her own virginity; so the translator caught this irony with the suggestive English "Virginia". On the other hand I may be deluding myself on this point, but Skvorecky does mention the symbolic nature of several characters' Czech names - none of which, by the way, come across in any English translation!)
It's just the kind of bold and whimsical act that makes the narrator and hero-to-be, Assistant Dispatcher Milos Hrma, admire Hubicka all the more (and, by comparison, lose confidence in himself, for Milos has had a little problem with premature ejaculation, preventing the fulfillment of his love for fellow employee Masha; it's made him uncomfortable with himself to the point of attempting suicide). Events conspire to lead Milos into his heroic act (blowing up a German munitions train headed to the eastern front). His participation in this exploit comes almost as an afterthought to his successful sexual escapade with an older woman who arrives at the station on a Resistance mission, delivering the bomb to be used to Hubicka. In fact, Milos' tryst with Victoria Freie gives him the confidence to imagine that he can undertake great things. He does and, as a consequence, he dies.
Some readers will probably react to the book's ending with reserve or skepticism, finding it too heroic in the sentimental mold - as the fire-bombed Dresden boils up into the western night sky and the munitions train explodes a few miles to the east Milos lies dying in the snow, fatally wounded by a German train guard whom he has shot (and Milos finds a common bond of humanity with his victim even as he "mercy-kills" him). In spite of this rather cinematic ending, Hrabal closes the book with one of his typical coarse, comical observations that is very deflating: "Sie sollen am Arsche zu Hause setzen.", quoting the train engineer who has just dropped off a bedraggled collection of Dresden residents who escaped incineration.
If you are such a skeptical reader made unhappy by the book's ending, you can reappraise its effect by now going back and reading the Introduction written by Hrabal's fellow Czech novelist, Josef Skvorecky (don't read the Introduction first). He not only discusses the uneasiness of readers over the book's finale, he explains just how it came about as a somewhat forced rewriting - forced by the political circumstances of the time -- of an earlier version of the story, a much grimmer and more brutal version known as "The Legend of Cain", written in the late 1940's and never published. That story not only tweaked the "hero-requirements" of the Communist bureaucracy's conventions of "socialist realism" in fiction, it also assailed some of the pieties of Czech nationalism. In other words it was a double-barreled shot bound to backfire on Hrabal. Reading this Introduction is indispensable to a fuller understanding of "Closely Watched Trains", and it explains the particularities of the practice of "cultural politics" and literary criticism within an aspiring totalitarian state (in the interest of fairness to what he feels is a work whose literary merits are undervalued, Skvorecky is just as hard on some of the dissidents who dismissed this novel as he is on the government which allowed it to be published then banned it).
The language is typically Hrabalian, i.e., fluent, colloquial, floating high ideals on low imagery, and inclined on occasion toward the rhapsodic (the rhapsody of the adolescent self discovering itself in a difficult situation). The translation by Edith Pargeter captures these qualities. The Northwestern University Press editions that started in the 1980s have the Skvorecky Introduction, as does an earlier publication of the novella by the Viking Penguin Press.
Summary of Closely Watched Trains (European Classics)
Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most beloved and accessible works. Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Milos Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Day after day as he watches trains fly by, he torments himself with the suspicion that he himself is being watched and with fears of impotency. Hrma finally affirms his manhood and, with a sense of peace and purpose he has never known before, heroically confronts a trainload of Nazis.Eastern European Books
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