Harlequin's Millions
A Novel
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
By the writer Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's greatest contemporary writer comes a novel (now in English for the first time) peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and sprinkled with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, this novel allows us into the mind of an elderly woman coming to terms with the passing of time.
Praise for Too Loud a Solitude:
"Short, sharp and eccentric. Sophisticated, thought-provoking and pithy." --Spectator
"Unmissable, combines extremes of comedy and seriousness, plus pathos, slapstick, sex and violence all stirred into one delicious brew." --The Guardian
"In imaginative riches and sheer exhilaration it offers more than most books twice its size. At once tender and scatological, playful and sombre, moving and irresistibly funny." --The Independent on Sunday
Praise for I Served the King of England:
"A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude." -- James Wood, The London Review of Books
"A comic novel of great inventiveness ... charming, wise, and sad--and an unexpectedly good laugh." --The Philadelphia Inquirer
"An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel." --The New York Times
"Dancing Lessons unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence. The gambit works. Something about that slab of wordage carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel." --Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A surreal and loquacious tale by Hrabal (I Served the King of England) takes place in a retirement home tucked within a small Czech castle. After selling their villa, a nameless woman and her husband, Francin, become the home's newest residents. Though familiar with the castle Francin's older brother, Pepin, who is ill, has lived there for several months the pair still find themselves adjusting to the new environment. While Francin envelops himself with news of the world, his wife Hrabal's narrator explores the castle, discovering secret statue gardens, beautiful battle frescoes hung up in the eating hall, and a trio of men (known as the "witnesses to old times") who whisk her away with tales of their shared home, a "little town where time stood still," visible from the castle windows. As the narrative unspools (while the record "Harlequin's Millions" plays nonstop at the home), the backstory of Francin and his wife takes shape. But Hrabal is more interested in constructing a book of memories: his narrator and the people around her frequently recall past triumphs and humiliations, former friends and acquaintances. Billed as "a fairy tale," the novel, at times, fancifully confounds expectations: a visiting doctor's lesson on classical music turns into a psychotic rampage, for example. And Hrabal's long, lyrical sentences (each chapter consists of a single paragraph) are not only exquisitely constructed, but also as spirited as the scenes they illustrate.
