The Gentle Barbarian
The Gentle Barbarian takes us to the heart of Boudník's creative drive: his gift for infusing the objects and events of everyday life with transcendent magic, and his passion for sharing his ideas and his art with anyone willing to listen. Hrabal's anecdotal portrait includes another controversial figure in that early postwar Czech avant-garde: the poet Egon Bondy, the pen name and alter ego of a self-styled "left-wing Marxist" philosopher called Zbynek Fiser.
Hrabal's amazing memoir celebrates the creative spirits who strove to reject, ignore, or burrow beneath an artificial "revolutionary" fervor. Fueled by vast quantities of beer, emboldened by friendship, driven by a sense of their own destiny, they filled the intellectual and spiritual vacuum around them with manic humor, inspiration, and purpose, and in doing so, pointed the way to a kind of salvation.
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Hrabal is quite capable of a Chekhovian realism, but always watchful for the splendid and sublime.--James Wood "London Review of Books"
A touching homage to Boudník's remarkable life and a showcase for Hrabal's skill.-- "Publishers Weekly"
A master.-- "The New Yorker"
Hrabal's capacity for simultaneous wonder and attentiveness--for a cold shrewdness matched by overflowing sympathy--is his most astonishing quality as a writer.--Matt Weir "Dissent"
The Gentle Barbarian, Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal's memoir of his friendship with the painter and printmaker Vladimír Boudnik, depicts life as a more reckless leap of faith--one that lands not in the hands of God, but in a tightening rope.--Paul Franz "Bookforum"
