Details

ISBN-10: 0810125463
ISBN-13: 9780810125469
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publish Date: 05/29/2010
Dimensions: 8.48" L, 6.58" W, 0.70" H

Vita Nuova

Translator: Tony Liman

Paperback

Price: $19.95

Overview

Vita Nuova is the second in a trilogy of memoirs written from the perspective of Bohumil Hrabal’s wife, Elis.ka, about their life in Prague from the 1950s to the 1970s, when Communist repression of artists was at its peak.

Hrabal’s inimitable humor, which in Elis.ka’s ruminations ranges from bawdy slapstick to cutting irony, is all the more penetrating for being directed at himself. Vita Nuova showcases Hrabal’s legendary bohemian intellectual life, particularly his relationship with Vladimír Boudník. Hrabal creates a shrewd, lively portrait of Eastern European intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century.

Read More
Reviews
"Hrabal, both as character in and author of Vita Nuova, seeks epiphanies in disorder, and intimations of the infinite in weakness and the grotesque. His metaphysics of the ordinary finds in the corrupted, chance-afflicted world flashes of beauty and transcendence: pearls in the mud. [Vita Nuova] is a refusal of artistic "normalization"...a lively emulation of the ars prosaica of a great Czech writer of the twentieth century." –The Times Literary Supplement
More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 0810125463
ISBN-13: 9780810125469
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publish Date: 05/29/2010
Dimensions: 8.48" L, 6.58" W, 0.70" H
Skip to content