Details

ISBN-10: 0811228584
ISBN-13: 9780811228589
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 03/02/2021
Dimensions: 8.20" L, 5.40" W, 0.40" H

The Gentle Barbarian

Translator: Paul Wilson

Paperback

Price: $14.95

Overview

The Gentle Barbarian is Bohumil Hrabal’s moving homage to Vladimír Boudník, a brilliant but troubled Czech graphic artist who died tragically at the age of forty-four a few months after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

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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Reviews
The narrative, more about their relationship than a critical discussion of Boudník's art, is replete with humorous and lavish personal anecdotes about surviving during a politically repressive time. Sometimes joined by their poet friend Egon Bondy, they would walk, talk, argue, drink excessive amounts of beer, and engage in outlandish adventures, which Hrabal fondly recounts with extravagant glee and warmth.– "Kirkus"
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Details

ISBN-10: 0811228584
ISBN-13: 9780811228589
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 03/02/2021
Dimensions: 8.20" L, 5.40" W, 0.40" H
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