The Gentle Barbarian

January 11, 2021
Hrabal (1914–1997) (Too Loud a Solitude) sketches a delightful portrait of his friend, Czech artist Vladimír Boudník, who died by suicide in 1968 at age 44. Hrabal opens with a brief account of Boudník’s death (“Vladimír plunged head-first from the Embankment of the present into the heart of eternity”) before rewinding and unspooling a series of anecdotes and rapid-fire remembrances from his days around Prague with Boudník. There are clear indications of the demons haunting his friend, but Hrabal’s absurdist, satirical prose is star of the show with its clever non sequiturs, ribald humor, paradoxical episodes, and comedic set pieces, such as an ambulance that roars up to a pub so the medics can wheel out beer on their stretcher. Many scenes end with sudden inspiration or overheated exasperation, such as when poet Egon Bondy hears of Boudník’s latest escapade and professes mock indignation: “Jesus, you two miscreants are stealing my thunder and you don’t even know you’re doing it.” Hrabal, with his episodic memories, mirrors Boudník’s artistic methods: “He found creativity in disorder.” The resulting romp succeeds as both a touching homage to Boudník’s remarkable life and a showcase for Hrabal’s skill.

February 1, 2021
The esteemed Czech writer offers up an affectionate portrait of a little-known Czech visual artist. Originally published in 1974 as a samizdat book in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, Hrabal's impressionistic, brief look at his eccentric, boisterous artist friend Vladim�r Boudn�k (1924-1968) is now available in English thanks to Wilson's fine translation. In this brief look at Boudn�k's life, he employs some of the artist's "methods"--e.g., "leave the text exposed, like an excavated street," and fill it with "fast-flowing, tossed-off sentences and words." He recalls when he and Boudn�k, who "suffered...acutely from hypochondria and hysteria, lived in rooms next to each other in a building in Libeň that they called the Embankment of Eternity; they yelled and argued back and forth about the mysteries of creativity. A "master of tactile imagination," Boudn�k created a lithographic art form he called Explosionalism, a process by which he would take random stains and spatters and blotches and turn them into recognizable images." The "overheated furnace of his brain," Hrabal writes, "found creativity in disorder." Working at a steel mill, Boudn�k was "transfixed" by the grinding machines, "enthralled by what he was seeing and what his imagination was making of it." The author is clearly impressed by "how beautifully structured Vladimir's graphic art is, how grounded it is," even when Boudn�k anointed himself and his etched metal plates "with his own semen as he worked." The narrative, more about their relationship than a critical discussion of Boudn�k's art, is replete with humorous and lavish personal anecdotes about surviving during a politically repressive time. Sometimes joined by their poet friend Egon Bondy, they would walk, talk, argue, drink excessive amounts of beer, and engage in outlandish adventures, which Hrabal fondly recounts with extravagant glee and warmth. Wilson includes Hrabal's "A Letter to Attendees at an Exhibition" and an illuminating afterword about the book's publishing history. Short on artistic insights but large on life.

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