The Gentle Barbarian
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An unforgettable portrait of a major pioneering artist, by “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer” (Milan Kundera)
The Gentle Barbarian is Bohumil Hrabal’s moving homage to Vladimír Boudník, a brilliant but troubled Czech graphic artist who died tragically at the age of forty-four a few months after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The Gentle Barbarian takes us to the heart of Boudník’s creative drive: his gift for infusing the objects and events of everyday life with transcendent magic, and his passion for sharing his ideas and his art with anyone willing to listen. Hrabal’s anecdotal portrait includes another controversial figure in that early postwar Czech avant-garde: the poet Egon Bondy, the pen name and alter ego of a self-styled “left-wing Marxist” philosopher called Zbynek Fišer.
Hrabal’s amazing memoir celebrates the creative spirits who strove to reject, ignore, or burrow beneath an artificial “revolutionary” fervor. Fueled by vast quantities of beer, emboldened by friendship, driven by a sense of their own destiny, they filled the intellectual and spiritual vacuum around them with manic humor, inspiration, and purpose, and in doing so, pointed the way to a kind of salvation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hrabal (1914–1997) (Too Loud a Solitude) sketches a delightful portrait of his friend, Czech artist Vladimír Boudník, who died by suicide in 1968 at age 44. Hrabal opens with a brief account of Boudník's death ("Vladimír plunged head-first from the Embankment of the present into the heart of eternity") before rewinding and unspooling a series of anecdotes and rapid-fire remembrances from his days around Prague with Boudník. There are clear indications of the demons haunting his friend, but Hrabal's absurdist, satirical prose is star of the show with its clever non sequiturs, ribald humor, paradoxical episodes, and comedic set pieces, such as an ambulance that roars up to a pub so the medics can wheel out beer on their stretcher. Many scenes end with sudden inspiration or overheated exasperation, such as when poet Egon Bondy hears of Boudník's latest escapade and professes mock indignation: "Jesus, you two miscreants are stealing my thunder and you don't even know you're doing it." Hrabal, with his episodic memories, mirrors Boudník's artistic methods: "He found creativity in disorder." The resulting romp succeeds as both a touching homage to Boudník's remarkable life and a showcase for Hrabal's skill.
