Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

by Bohumil Hrabal

Book Overview

This ebullient, gallivanting novel encapsulates the world vision of the Czech Republic's best-loved author in one tumbling, breathtaking sentence. Saints and sinners, emperors and embezzlers, barmaids... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590173775
• ISBN13: 9781590173770
• Release Date: May 2011
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.9" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

One of the most charming books on earth

Imagine you are a young girl and an old man is standing on a ladder by a tree and picking cherries. He starts telling you events from his and his ancestors lives, and he won't stop for the next 2 or 3 hours. (This is the time you will need to read that book.) It is incredible how he switches from one topic to the next in an unpredictable way, but nevertheless this book is a single speech. It is written in ONE sentence. OK, Hrabal uses question and exclamation marks from time to time, but these do not really end a sentence, no, it goes on and on... Hrabal shows, that he has learned from James Joyce, this book is very much influenced by Joyces' streams of consciousness, but it is much more easy to read because of the bizarre humour of this old man on the tree. Read this book, and teach your mind how to dance...

Brilliant modernist story telling

Hrabal writes with such passion, wit, humour and compassion that it is hard to imagine anyone not enjoying this book