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Books

The very Czech (and very funny) brilliance of Bohumil Hrabal

The stories in Mr Kafka and Other Tales, reissued after 50 years, are as fresh, funny and incisive as they were when first published

12 March 2016

9:00 AM

12 March 2016

9:00 AM

Mr Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Paul Wilson

Vintage, pp.142, £9.99, ISBN: 9780811224802

‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who died in 1997) once wrote, with typical self-deprecation and comic timing; but there are other versions of what made him change from being an almost rococo engineer of magic realism (‘building my house from the roof on down’, as he put it) to the flawlessly brisk comic writer he became.

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