I Served the King of England

Jan Dítě measures his own worth entirely in centimeters of height and stacks of banknotes, working his way up from provincial hotels to Prague's grandest establishments on pure, guileless ambition, learning his trade's supreme skill, anticipating exactly what a guest wants before they say it, from a retired headwaiter's legendary boast of once having served the King of England himself. Hrabal keeps Dítě's narration so relentlessly focused on his own petty triumphs and humiliations that the reader has to do the moral accounting Dítě himself never performs, most damningly when he marries Líza, a German woman, during the occupation specifically to be classified as ethnically German, and uses money from a stolen, confiscated stamp collection to open his own luxury hotel while Europe burns around him.

The novel's picaresque comedy never lets up even as its stakes rise, Dítě's hotel of mirrors built to make his single millionaire's dream literal, guests reflected back at themselves a thousand times over, right up until the postwar Communist state arrests him not for his wartime complicity but simply for having been rich, a bureaucratic irony Hrabal delivers completely deadpan. Dítě's total absorption in his own advancement, oblivious to the atrocity subsidizing it, makes him one of Central European fiction's most damning unreliable narrators precisely because he never once seems to notice he's being damning. Hrabal frames the whole book as Dítě's own dictated memoir, written from the road-mender's cottage he ends up in, so the reader is always hearing the story of his rise filtered through the perspective of a man who has already lost everything it bought him.

Hrabal drafted the novel at extraordinary speed in 1971, working almost without revision, and its comic momentum owes something to that method: the prose reads like it was talked rather than composed. The book was unpublishable in Czechoslovakia's post-1968 political climate and circulated for years only in samizdat and foreign editions before finally appearing officially at home in 1989, the year the regime it quietly indicts finally fell. Hrabal himself lived through the same decades of shifting fortune the novel compresses into Dítě's life, and the road-mender's ending carries the particular authority of a writer who had, by then, made his own peace with quiet, unglamorous survival.