The Death of Mr. Baltisberger

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.

Author: Bohumil Hrabal
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 11/30/2010
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 7.72h x 5.58w x 0.57d
ISBN13: 9780810127012
ISBN10: 0810127016
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | General

About the Author
BOHUMIL HRABAL (1914-1997) is considered one of the greatest Czech novelists of the twentieth century. He won international acclaim for the novels Closely Watched Trains, I Served the King of England, and Too Loud a Solitude.

MICHAEL HENRY HEIM is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UCLA. He is the translator of books by Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Günter Grass, Anton Chekhov, Danilo Kis, Karel Čapek, and others.