SOURCE: Simon, Linda. “Remembrance of Things Past.” World & I 8, no. 12 (December 1993): 327-30.

In the following review of Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Simon emphasizes Hrabal's evocation of his fond memories of Czechoslovakia's past.

Bohumil Hrabal, one of Czechoslovakia's most acclaimed writers, is perhaps best known to American readers as the author of Closely Watched Trains, a novel that, in 1967, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. More political in theme than many of Hrabal's other works of fiction, the story concerns a young man in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who is killed when he attempts to blow up a German ammunition train. In Hrabal's other tales, although he alludes to political events in Czechoslovakia, he is more interested in exploring the ways in which ordinary people perceive reality and create their own imaginary worlds.

Not until 1989 was Hrabal's fiction available in English translation: first...