I Served The King Of England

Ditie is a pint-sized hotel waiter with big dreams.

Between pocketing stolen change from unsuspecting customers and reminiscing on nights spent at the local brothel, he fantasises about his immense - and imagined - riches.

Then, ludicrously, Ditie’s dreams start to become reality.

Yet while his chaotic adventures lead him to ever more glamorous hotels, beyond the sparkling dining halls, the forces of twentieth-century European history march on.

A whirlwind of comic genius, a gut-punch of narrative power, this is the story of one small man’s rise and fall – or fall and rise – against the shadowy backdrop of Europe’s darkest days.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRLWELL

Review

The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography ― Times Literary Supplement

Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairytale and satire.He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him

Well worth reading ― The Book Magazine

A master of rueful comedy and tender eroticism, Hrabal was, for all his eccentricity, a major figure in 20th-century world literature.

About the Author

Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his "hyper-realist" texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. In February 1997 he flew out of his hospital window never to return.