I Served the King of England - Paperback

by Bohumil Hrabal (Author), Paul Wilson (Translator)

First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.

Front Jacket

A comic, picaresque novel set against the backdrop of twentieth-century Czech history, about the rise and fall of an ambitious busboy in Prague.

Back Jacket

Isolated and impoverished, Ditie comes to a greater understanding of good and evil, and of his place in the vortex of history.