Books like Cutting It Short

What a surprise this little book has been; a surprise not exactly pleasant though. I expected Hrabal’s poetic cartwheels and his incredible descriptive skills, but I was nonplussed by the black humor and the skepticism that drenched this story.Set in a small Bohemian town between the wars we follow the eccentric doings of a young woman called Maryska and her husband, who runs the local brewery. A wild arrange of characters populate a tale full of rather comic situations that won’t leave any reader indifferent: a feast of blood of butchered pigs, trips to Prague that bring back the most astonishing gadgets, an uncle who is not right in the head that explains the most peculiar stories of WWI… Scenes straddling the grotesque and the cultured that allude to a dark reality where not only skirts, tails and hair are cut short, but also free will and basic human rights.In Hrabal’s most quirky style, a double narrative is exposed and Maryska’s eccentricities signify something bigger than her daring not to conceal her uninhibited personality. The repressive atmosphere of the last pages bespeaks of the greater evil of totalitarian regimes, which permeates Hrabal’s fiction as few other authors do, leaving the reader dumbfounded about what he has truly read. A pity that I missed half of the joke and that the bitter taste of failure is what I will mostly remember of this rather dark but poignant tale.