The Death of Mr. Baltisberger

By Bohumil Hrabal

Book Overview

Originally published as The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, the fourteen stories in Romance showcase the breadth of Bohumil Hrabal's considerable gifts: his humor of the grotesque, his often surprising warmth, and his hard-edged, fast-paced style. In the story "Romance," a plumber's apprentice and a gypsy girl reach toward a tentative connection across the chasm that separates their worlds. Another unlikely love story, "World Cafeteria," features a romance between a young man whose girlfriend has just committed suicide and a bride whose husband lands in jail on their wedding night. The tone turns to the absurd in "The Death of Mr. Baltisberger," where a crippled ex-motorcyclist and three people he meets at the track exchange wildly improbably reminiscences, while a fatal Grand Prix motorcycle race rages around them. Hrabal's psychological insight into quotidian interactions saturates stories such as "A Dull Afternoon," where a mysterious, self-absorbed stranger disrupts the psychic calm of a neighborhood tavern and becomes the silent catalyst for an unwanted truth. Throughout the collection, noted translator Michael Henry Heim captures the quirky speech patterns and idiosyncratic takes on life that have made Hrabal's characters an indispensable part of world literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810127016
• ISBN13: 9780810127012
• Release Date: November 2010
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

I would kill for this book

Sometimes late at night I remeber holding it in my hands and reading it. Once, just once, and I had to give it back to the vile Bohemian who loaned it to me, who was vile because he would not let me steal it. You would not be here if you did not want more Hrablania, so, you do not need me to tell you the quality of this book, except it is just as Hrabal as the best of them, and perhaps even more so---the short story seems well suited to the master palavarer. Me, I am saving up whatever it will take to get ahold of a copy.