SOURCE: Steinberg, Sybil S. Review of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, by Bohumil Hrabal. Publishers Weekly 242, no. 26 (26 June 1995): 86.

In the following review, Steinberg offers a positive assessment of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age.

The unnamed narrator of this comic rant [Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age] proclaims that any book worth its salt is “meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.” Czech novelist Hrabal (Closely Watched Trains) very nearly fills that peculiar bill in this humorous and breathless affair, which is told in one never-ending sentence—a technique that just may make readers pay him the ultimate compliment by looking around for handy blunt objects. The narrator, a scurrilous old man who claims to have been a shoemaker and a brewer, approaches six sunbathing women and embarks on a rambling monologue...