The Gentle Barbarian (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811228589)

The Gentle Barbarian is Bohumil Hrabal's moving homage to Vladim? Boudn?, 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 Boudn?'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.

Author: Bohumil Hrabal
ISBN-10: 0811228584
ISBN-13: 9780811228589
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 03/02/2021
Pages: 128
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/11/2021
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2021