A review by dkeatingmyers
Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal

5.0

This is the finest novel I've read in a long, long time. It's a pity Hrabal isn't more widely celebrated than the film he ultimately spawned. In fact, Hrabal's lack of acclaim in the English world is nothing less than bizarre to me, based on the merits of his work here. This is so much more than a coming of age story. It is so much more than a war novel. It is a study in human action, and inaction, in the razor's edge that divides life into an unspeakably horrible collection of failings and disappointments and a startlingly easy enjoyment of simple pleasures and the humor of even the blackest situations. Young Milos is provided with meaning by the articficial construct of the railroad bureaucracy as he recovers from his suicide attempt. This is in no way due to the formal merits of the bureaucratic pursuits of Hrma, Lansk, or the antihero Hubicka. Rather, it is the gently recognized absurdity of the war, of the failings of the hyperformal Nazi state, of the power and station provided by the inanity of a railroad uniform. The characters of the novel turn their staid station into an oasis of life as it is actually led. Sex, death, power, and subversion frolick here, without undue seriousness. Indeed, the strength of the novel is undoubtedly the manner in which its spits in the face of Continental existentialism through the facility of Milos' rehabilitation. His suicide attempt is a clear indicator of his horror at the very thought of sexual dysfunction, of powerlessness in a land where his forefathers have literally been overrun (see Grandfather anecdote) by the Nazis. The station provides him with jocular meaning, the envy of Hubicka's ass-stamping with the means to reach sexual maturity in the station master's office, the recovery of a sense of investment in the war effort in the novel's final scene, as Milos finally destroys the German ammunition train. I love this book, plain and simple.