I Served The King Of England

"I Served the King of England is a Czech picaresque novel which narrates the whole 20th century history of Czechoslovakia – Nazism, Stalinism – from the perspective of a semi-literate waiter whose only goal seems to be to try to get laid. It’s hilarious and I learned a lot from the book about how to write the 20th century history of Bengal and Calcutta without making it read like a history book. I really struggled with that at one stage of the writing process and I read a lot of books to figure out a workaround, but no one helped me as much as Hrabal. This novel, and another one by Hrabal, were made into films by Jiri Menzel, and were part of the Czech New Wave. Hrabal was also a big influence on Milan Kundera. He was in turn heavily influenced by Jaroslav Hasek who wrote The Good Soldier Svejk , which is a hilarious novel about a coward trying to evade conscription during World War I. Hasek and Hrabal both write like they’re telling stories at a bar, and in that I think they’re part of an Eastern European tradition that’s connected to oral storytelling. There’s a link with Leskov’s work too, I suspect, where the novel seems like a transcript of a storyteller’s narration. I think Syed Mujtaba Ali was familiar with this genre of literature, having read such works translated in German or French, and he imported this form into Bengali and melded it with our own storytelling and “adda” or raconteur traditions. I’ve tried to copy and adopt that mode of writing in my book, though I don’t know to what extent I’ve succeeded."