The Little Town Where Time Stood Still ─ Cutting It Short

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer.” “Cutting It Short” is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Mary?ka, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Mary?ka drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. She’s a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The Little Town Where Time Stood Still” is told by Mary?ka and Francin’s son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new post–World War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life. Together, Hrabal’s rousing and outrageous yarns stand as a hilarious and heartbreaking tribute to the always imperiled sweetness of lust, love, and life.

Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) was born in Brno, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. More interested in poetry and the life of the brewery managed by his stepfather than in his studies, and unable to find a publisher for his poetry once the Communist Party came to power in 1948, Hrabal held a series of odd jobs, including notary clerk, warehouseman, railroad worker, and traveling salesman. In 1962 he became a full-time writer, but due to government restrictions was obliged to publish much of his work in underground editions or abroad. The motion-picture adaptation of Closely Watched Trains brought him international recognition, including the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but only in 1976 was he “rehabilitated” by the government and permitted to publish select works. By the time of his death—he fell from a fifth-floor window in a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the birds—Hrabal was one of the world’s most famous Czech writers and the author of nearly fifty books. Among his other works available in English translation are The Death of Mr. Baltisberger and Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (NYRB Classics).

James Naughton (1950–2014) was a translator of Czech literature and poetry and a professor of Czech and Slovak language and literature at Oxford University. In addition to The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, he translated Bohumil Hrabal’s Cutting It Short and Total Fears: Letters to Dubenka.