He wanted to grow up to be a millionaire, he tells us, so that he could buy ‘phosphorescent hands for all the city clocks’ in Prague.
There is Hanta, the narrator of Too Loud a Solitude, who has been compacting waste for 35 years, and educating himself on the sly using the great books he rescues from the trash. But many of Hrabal’s comic heroes are equally talkative. The character relieving himself of this little confession is a garrulous cobbler, who admits to being ‘an admirer of the European Renaissance’, and is the narrator of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence by the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997. ‘Tiny’, above all: a marvellous word, because it suggests that this man, while possibly proud of his handicap, might also disdain it, or believe that he could just brush it away whenever he wanted and get on with the business of doing great things. And isn’t that phrase ‘tiny black cloud’ done with great finesse? It hints at a man whose sense of himself has so swelled that he now sees himself geographically, like a darkened area experiencing a bout of low pressure on a weather-map of Europe. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism. There is a comedy, and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large (‘for all mankind’) that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the ‘tiny black cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote.
What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’
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