2010 books

[peteryoung]

2) Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 1964
An unnamed narrator holds forth to a group of ladies he obviously wants to impress on matters such as marital strife, dream symbolism, personal hygeine, crooks, barmaids, balalaikas, unlikely personal dalliances and anything else that comes to mind, all in one rambling, tumbling, obscenely long and unfinished sentence that's clearly meant to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. As with both the other books by Hrabal that I've read, the bizarrely worthwhile Too Loud a Solitude and Closely Observed Trains, Hrabal's linear momentum became rather effortless once I got into his awkward rhythm: the oddness of what he's describing was somehow shaken off and I found myself indulging this vainglorious character all the way. As book-length, comic self-portraits go this is excellent, and Hrabal's self-imposed task of writing an entire book in a single sentence was clearly a constraint he could also turn into something of a liberation.