I didn't realise when I ordered a stack of Hrabal books online that this is the sequel to 'Cutting It Short' and features the same set of characters - so it's quite serendipitous that I left my daughter to select the order in which I read them, and she choose... wisely.

This is just tremendous work; Mary is in it a little less than in 'Cutting it Short' but Uncle Pepin is just as loud, arrogant, and magnificent as ever, and Francin even gets to play a bigger, more interesting role.

A joy to read from start to finish - I only wish there was more... ( )

Relata un niño de ocho años la vida de su padre y su tío (hermanos). El padre es gerente de una cervecería, está casado con una hermosa mujercita, es honesto y aburrido; su tío Pepi es obrero en la fábrica, gasta todo su tiempo en tabernas donde solo sirven mujeres, y vino a pasar quince días pero nunca se fue. Después llegan los alemanes, se van, llegan los rusoso, impera el socialismo, la cervecería pasa a ser del pueblo, los años desgastan al tío Pepi. ( )

This book includes two novellas written by one of the leading lights of the literary resistance movement that helped bring about the Velvet Revolution in Prague in 1989. The introduction by Josef Skvorecky provides a good description of the setting in which Bohumil Hrabal wrote, including his constant cat-and-mouse games with the ultra-paranoid censors of the communist government of Czechoslovakia. The first of the novellas was actually written later, and was seemingly designed to avoid trouble with the censors. The characters are based on Hrabal's own family, with the narrator in the first novella being Maryska, the rebellious young woman apparently modeled on Hrabal's mother. Other characters include Francin, the father, and the hilarious Uncle Pepin, who comes to visit Francin and Maryska for two weeks and stays for the remainder of time. Having recently visited Prague and West Bohemia, I was thrilled to read Hrabal's wonderful descriptions of small town life and the workings of a small brewery. The second of the novellas was written a few years earlier and had a much tougher time with the censors. The reason becomes plainly evident near the end of the book after the communist government takes over. The wonderful and rich small town life depicted in Cutting it Short and the first portion of The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is slowly eroded away to reveal the gray melancholy of the communist state. Mr. Hrabal does a masterful job of portraying the devastation wrought in the transition, and the censors must have been shaking in their boots when reading this stuff. Hrabal's writing style was odd in that he could easily go two or three pages at a time without a paragraph break. His punctuation consisted primarily of comma, but it's not distracting at all once you get used to it. Of course, I was reading the English translation by James Naughton, so I have no idea whether these apparent oddness of writing style appears in the original Czech or not. In any event, I will seek out more of the writing of Mr. Hrabal as soon as possible. ( )

I'd read Too Loud a Solitude previously and found it enchanting--The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is equally brilliant and ranks as one of the most fun novels I've run across; actually there are two novellas combined into one book, the first told from the POV of Mary, the second by her young son. Mary's one of the most singularly bizarre narrators ever, and her whimsical tale reads like a fable tinged with eroticism and joy. She and her husband's brother Pepin (another amazing character) get into all kinds of trouble due to soft-headedness and restlessness and an ingenuity for chaotic behavior. Mary's husband Francin tries to hold the world together, and her father smashes furniture in repeated rages, and her son gets a tattoo at a tender age and various pets are hurt or killed while Germany invades, occupies, and then the Iron Curtain descends and yet things somehow remain ridiculous. Underneath it all run political critiques of fascism and Stalinism which are as entertaining as they are enlightening. I situate Hrabal somewhere between Garcia-Marquez, Borges, and Bruno Schultz. Great, great stuff. ( )