Closely Watched Trains - Penguin Classics

A classic of postwar literature, a small masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism from one of the best Czech writers For twenty-two-year-old Milos, bumbling apprentice at a sleepy Czech railway station, life is full of worries: his burdensome virginity, his love for the pretty conductor Masha, the scandalous goings-on in the station master's office. Beside them, the part he will come to play against the occupying Germans seems a simple affair, in Bohumil Hrabal's touching, absurd masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism. Closely Watched Trains , which became the award-winning Jiri Menzel film of the 'Prague Spring', is a masterpiece that fully justifies Hrabal's reputation as one of the best Czech writers of the twentieth century.

Report

Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairy tale and satire. He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him Julian Barnes

Product details

• Authors: Bohumil Hrabal, Hrabal Bohumil, Edith Pargeter
• Assisted by: Edith Pargeter (Translation), Pargeter Edith (Translation)
• Publisher: Penguin Books Uk
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.03.2017
• EAN: 9780241290224
• ISBN: 978-0-241-29022-4
• No. of pages: 96
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 5 mm
• Series: Penguin Classics; Modern Classics; Penguin Modern Classics; Penguin Modern Classics; Penguin Classics; Modern Classics
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Tschechische SchriftstellerInnen: Werke (div.), Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Literary, Fiction in translation, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary