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I Served the King of England, by Bohumil Hrabal

Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson

In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia.

"One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination." --Milan Kundera

First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athelete as the Germans are invading Czechlosovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.

"A comic novel of great inventiveness . . . charming, wise, and sad--and an unexpectedly good laugh." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"I Served the King of England is a joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude, a modulation typical of Hrabal's greatest work." --James Wood, The London Review of Books

BOHUMIL HRABAL (1914-1997) was born in Moravia and started writing poems under the influence of French surrealism. In the early 1950's he began to experiment with a stream-of-consciousness style, and eventually wrote such classics as Closely Watched Trains (made into an Academy Award-winning film directed by Jiri Menzel), The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, and Too Loud a Solitude. He fell to his death from the fifth floor of a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the pigeons.

Date of publication: May 2007