Hochzeiten im Hause

HRABAL, Bohumil.

Hochzeiten im Hause. Ein Mädchenroman.

FIRST GERMAN EDITION. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993.

Text in German, translated from the Czech by Susanna Roth. 8vo. 454 pp. Cloth; in the publisher's pictorial dust jacket designed by Hermann Michels, reproducing Jiří Kolář's collage Begegnung from the cycle Tagebuch 1968. Stated first edition (“Erste Auflage 1993”). ISBN 3-518-40530-6.

An autobiographical novel in two parts, and the strangeness of it is that Hrabal writes in his wife's voice: she tells the story of their meeting, his courting, her hesitation, the wedding, and then the odd marriage that followed — the friends and neighbours and colleagues, what each partner could and could not give the other, and what it was like to live beside a man who was writing. The first part is told as a conventional narrative; the second, Vita nuova, runs as an unpunctuated stream. The Czech originals, Svatby v domě and Vita nuova, were published in 1988 by Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto — the press Josef Škvorecký and Zdena Salivarová founded in 1971 to print Czech and Slovak writers banned under the communist regime, and which issued more than two hundred titles before 1989. This one-volume German edition was abridged with the author's agreement, and does not include the third part of the sequence.

SKU TO-2026-152