Bohumil Hrabal's work has had a profound influence on the development of twentieth-century Czech prose both in style and subject matter. He has also been a significant influence on movies and the theater. His prose works are his main contribution to Czech literature; mostly short and colloquial in style, they introduce common Czech language and show the ordinary man as the unheroic hero. Irony, humor, a trenchant style, and acutely observed details create a milieu the reader can relate to, one in which the author freely alternates between pub talk, philosophical aphorisms, folk wisdom, and the precepts of historians. As a rule the resultant texts have no substantial plot, but they fascinate the reader with separate dramatic incidents connected by a continuous flow of speech. Hrabal also had a mostly unintentional but considerable influence on politics. At the time of the post-1968 "normalization" in the 1970s and the...