{"id":281676,"date":"2011-01-24T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/01\/24\/latest-review-vita-nuova-by-bohumil-hrabal\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:59","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:59","slug":"latest-review-vita-nuova-by-bohumil-hrabal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/01\/24\/latest-review-vita-nuova-by-bohumil-hrabal\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Vita Nuova" by Bohumil Hrabal"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews Section<\/a> is a piece by Dan Vitale on Bohumil Hrabal’s Vita Nuova<\/em>, which is translated from the Czech by Tony Liman and available from Northwestern University Press. <\/p>\n

Dan Vitale is a regular contributor<\/a> to Three Percent—a program sponsored in party through a grant from NYSCA<\/span>—and has written a number of thoughtful, interesting reviews for us. <\/p>\n

Bohumil Hrabal is one of the all-time great writers. Closely Watched Trains<\/em>, I Served the King of England<\/em>, Too Loud a Solitude<\/em>, all absolutely spectacular. It’s great that Northwestern has been publishing this “autobiographical trilogy,” which sounds both playful and captivating. The lack of commas and periods in this volume brings to mind the one-sentence Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age<\/em>,<\/a> which is effing brilliant and will soon be available from NYRB<\/span>. <\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s a bit about Vita Nuova<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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Vita Nuova<\/em> is the second volume in a trilogy of autobiographical novels based on Bohumil Hrabal\u2019s courtship of and marriage to Eli\u0161ka Plevov\u00e1 (nicknamed Pipsi) and the first decade or so of his fame as one of Czechoslovakia\u2019s most beloved writers. Originally published in samizdat in Prague in 1986, not long before Plevov\u00e1\u2019s death, and then in Toronto by Josef \u0160kvoreck\u00fd\u2019s Czech-language 68 Publishers, the trilogy plays fast and loose with the concepts of both autobiography and the novel, reflecting each in a kind of narrative funhouse mirror: the books are narrated not by Hrabal nor a fictional stand-in but by Pipsi. That is, they are an act of creative ventriloquism by a novelist imagining that his wife had written three memoirs about their life together.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The first volume, In-House Weddings<\/em> (translated, like Vita Nuova<\/em>, by Tony Liman and available from Northwestern), is set during the late 1950s in the Prague district of Libe\u0148, and covers the relatively short period between the couple\u2019s first meeting in the courtyard of the building where Hrabal lives alone in a small flat, and their eventual wedding celebration in the same courtyard. Vita Nuova<\/em>, which covers the first several years of the marriage, picks up the story shortly thereafter but with a sudden, startling change in Pipsi\u2019s narrative voice, perhaps to reflect the \u201cnew life\u201d indicated by the novel\u2019s title. (The Italian is an homage to La Vita Nuova<\/em>, Dante\u2019s collection of annotated poems about courtly love, but the content of Hrabal\u2019s book seems otherwise unconnected to Dante\u2019s.) The relatively conventional paragraphs of In-House Weddings<\/em>, though frequently made up of long and sometimes comma-spliced sentences, have given way to a series of pages-long paragraphs whose sentences, oddly, lack commas and periods but not initial capitals (although questions and exclamations are properly end-punctuated). A preface to the book acknowledges a stylistic debt to Molly Bloom\u2019s stream-of-consciousness soliloquy in James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, but (at least in translation) Hrabal\u2019s prose is less disciplined and poetic than Joyce\u2019s. After a chapter or two, the reader learns to rely on the capitals as the primary sign that one sentence has ended and another has begun, and the absence of periods becomes only the memory of an odd quirk that is never fully justified by the narrative.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Marriage has seemingly changed not just Pipsi\u2019s writing style but her personality. In the first volume, she is strong but also forgiving and somewhat na\u00efve. Ethnically German, hailing from a well-to-do family in the Czech region of Moravia, a survivor of racially-motivated persecution and forced labor during World War II, and most recently having been abandoned by an unfaithful fianc\u00e9, Pipsi is enamored of Hrabal and mostly indulgent toward his vices of procrastination and drink (though also quietly dismayed by them). In Vita Nuova<\/em> she has suddenly become much flintier and more opinionated, much more open in her displeasures and dissatisfactions; as with the change in prose style, it is difficult to tell if Hrabal intends the contrast deliberately or has not exercised enough care in presenting the complexities of Pipsi\u2019s character. At times we seem meant to pity her; at others she seems as extravagantly fuming a witness to her husband\u2019s hapless misadventures as Margaret Dumont\u2019s characters were to Groucho Marx\u2019s shenanigans.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the full review.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Bohumil Hrabal’s Vita Nuova, which is translated from the Czech by Tony Liman and available from Northwestern University Press. Dan Vitale is a regular contributor to Three Percent—a program sponsored in party through a grant from NYSCA—and has written a number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[17326,19596,26606,24116,1646,37846,37836],"class_list":["post-281676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-bohumil-hrabal","tag-czech-literature","tag-dan-vitale","tag-northwestern-university-press","tag-review","tag-tony-liman","tag-vita-nuova"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312406,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281676\/revisions\/312406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}