Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

"A phenomenal book. A literal translation of the Czech title would be: Advanced Dancing Lessons for the Elderly. It consists of a single sentence: a monologue being delivered to a gang of women sunbathing topless—and perhaps also bottomless—behind a church. The subject of the monologue is nothing less than the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The narrator, who is and isn’t Hrabal, is concerned with elegance: not with decadence, but with elegance—in literature, painting, music, but especially in fashion. He is especially taken with army uniforms: soldiers, to his mind, should always be well-dressed. And there was no better-dressed army than Austria-Hungary’s. It becomes apparent, after a bit, that the narrator is drunk, and that his endless sermonizing is just drunk-talk: a harangue at the end of the bar. Hrbal himself was always intoxicated with intoxication as a literary, and political, principle: the notion that to live in this world you have to in some way numb your sensibilities. His characters essentially enter a pub under the monarchy and drink the pub dry. They emerge only to find that they’ve boozed their way through history: they’ve missed Nazism and communism, and they now have to stumble home, which is, of course, an imaginary ‘home’—an imaginary past—through the gaudy solicitations of the free-market. Hrabal’s characters drink so as not to be harmed by others. They prefer to harm themselves. I’m not sure. I don’t know whether it would be a good thing for the political novel to be in good shape, or a bad thing for it to be in good shape, or a good thing for it to be in bad shape, or a bad thing for it to be in bad shape. I think if there’s any lesson to be taken from my choice of books here, it’s this: the political must be founded in the individual. These writers, these characters, cannot be reduced to any one specific camp, or any one specific ideology: they resist this reduction and, in fact, would regard this reduction as a mechanism of oppression. That said, it’s the novelist’s tendency to refuse to agree with anyone: to agree is to be destroyed. Novelists must insist on their own words—it’s only by doing so that they can hope to speak against their time."