In-House Weddings

Inspired by "Mrs. Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoevsky, whose biographies about their husbands have now been published in Prague," Bohumil Hrabal decided to produce his own autobiographical work, ostensibly fiction, from his wife's point of view. He would write, he said, "not a putdown about myself, but a little bit of how it all was, that marriage of ours, with myself as a jewel and adornment of our life together."

The task, taken up by such a rogue comic talent, could be nothing other than strangely delightful; and in In-House Weddings, the first of the trilogy that Hrabal produced, we meet the author through the eyes of his wife Eliska. She narrates his life from his upbringing in Nymburk through his work as a dispatcher in a train station and then in a scrap paper plant, his first publication, his trouble with the authorities, and his association with notable artists and authors such as Jiri Kolar, Vladimir Boudnik, and Arnost Lustig. Hrabal's bohemian life was itself a source of great interest to the Czech public; transmuted here, it is even more compelling, a wry portrait of artistic life in postwar Eastern Europe and a telling reflection on how such a life might be recast in the light of literary brilliance.

Praise for Bohumil Hrabal:
"Hrabal's comedy, then, is complexly paradoxical. Holding in balance limitless desire and limited satisfaction, it is both rebellious and fatalistic, restless and wise. . .. It is a comedy of blockage, of displacement, entrapment, cancellation. . .. Hrabal, in Freud's terms, is a great humorist. And a great writer." --London Review of Books

"Anyone familiar with the dark and obliquely humorous imagination of Mr. Hrabal . . . will know that he could no more bear the predictability of . . . a formula than he could stomach the inane conformism demanded by a socialist bureaucracy. . . [His book] is an irresistibly eccentric romp, quick with the heart's life and about as schematic as a drunken night on the town. . . . Mr. Hrabal's is a cry of expiring humanism." --New York Times