Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age - Softcover

Hrabal, Bohumil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860462154 ISBN 13: 9781860462153

Publisher: Harvill Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Panturle lives in the village of Aubignane, in the Provencal uplands. He is a huge man: "When he met a living animal, he looked at it without moving: it was a fox, a hare, or a big snake in the rubble. He did not move; he took his time. He knew that somewhere in a bush there was a wire noose which strangled necks that passed by." Aubignane was a deserted village. That autumn Gaubert the smithy, "a little man all moustache", left; and before the winter was out the well-sinker's widow had left as well.
Then only Panturle remained, a man made morose almost to the point of madness by his solitude. He gave up planting and lived off what he could catch. Then out of the blue a woman arrived, someone to live for, someone to till the soil for and plant new seed. Even a village can be raised from the dead.

About this title

About the Author

Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his "hyper-realist" texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. In February 1997 he flew out of his hospital window never to return.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Czech

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvill Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1860462154
• ISBN 13: 9781860462153
• Binding: Paperback