Closely Watched Trains
  • Published: 18 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241290224
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $14.99

Closely Watched Trains

Formats & editions
Paperback
18 Apr 2017
EBook
30 Mar 2017
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A classic of postwar literature, a small masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism from one of the best Czech writers

For gauche young apprentice Milos Hrma, life at the small but strategic railway station in Bohemia in 1945 is full of complex preoccupations. There is the exacting business of dispatching German troop trains to and from the toppling Eastern front; the problem of ridding himself of his burdensome innocence; and the awesome scandal of Dispatcher Hubicka's gross misuse of the station's official stamps upon the telegraphist's anatomy. Beside these, Milos's part in the plan for the ammunition train seems a simple affair.

Closely Watched Trains, which became the award-winning Jiri Menzel film of the 'Prague Spring', is a masterpiece that fully justifies Hrabal's reputation as one of the best Czech writers of the twentieth century.
  • Published: 18 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241290224
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $14.99
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About the author

Bohumil Hrabal

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.

Also by Bohumil Hrabal

Cutting It Short
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still
Mr Kafka
Harlequin's Millions
I Served The King Of England
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
See all

Praise for Closely Watched Trains

Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairy tale and satire. He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him

Julian Barnes

Hrabal, to my mind, is one of the greatest European prose writers

Philip Roth

One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague; an incredible union of earthy humour and baroque imagination... What is unique about Hrabal is his capacity for joy

Milan Kundera

Hrabal's comedy is completely paradoxical. Holding in balance limitless desire and limited satisfaction, it is both rebellious and fatalistic, restless and wise

James Wood, London Review of Books

A poignant, humorous tale

New York Times Book Review