March 28, 2014, marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bohumil Hrabal, perhaps the best-loved author ever to write in Czech. His life’s work—numbering over three dozen volumes, including the slim yet overflowing Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude, translated by Michael Henry Heim), described by James Wood as “his finest book” and “the closest Hrabal came to a self-portrait”—itself would suffice to make a legend of him. Yet it also served as the inspirational launching pad for the 1960s Czechoslovak New Wave in cinema. Celebrations of Hrabal’s centennial are underway this year not only in Prague, but in New York and Madrid as well.

Today, Jáchym Topol is recognized as the leading author of the generation of Czech authors who’ve come of age since the end of communism in Eastern Europe with the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He shares a language with Hrabal, though his writing style and life experience are worlds apart. Here, he shares what it was like to grow up in Hrabal’s shadow and the not-so-straightforward impact that Hrabal had on him.

Bohumil Hrabal juts up in front of my generation like a boulder. It’s the same as that other boulder, Švejk. You can go around it, dig underneath it, jump over it, try to break it, but still, there it is.

When I was eighteen or twenty, Hrabal set me free, it was liberating. When I read him it gave me the feeling that writing could be easy. Up until then, I’d had this strangled feeling inside me that I couldn’t let myself write. Hrabal gave me the freedom to throw myself into writing. But it was a false liberation. I realized that it’s an awful lot of work to make a text look simple, straightforward, authentic. Hrabal himself wrote about this naïve idea and how people were always harassing him, saying, “Come to our factory cafeteria, you won’t believe what people say!” Or: “There’s this incredible moron that lives on our street. Give him a beer and he’ll start talking and you can just write it down.” It’s just nonsense. More.

See: Asymptote

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