CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS

CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS

By Bohumil Hrabal

Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains is a novel of World War 2, set in a small town in Czechoslovakia in 1945. The Germans are losing the war. The narrator, Milos Hrma, an innocent young man, is employed by the railroad and works in the local station. The war has reduced the time horizon to the present, as violence, paranoia and suspicion define life. Trains come and go, and there is work to be done, but the mundane is never far from the brutality of occupation. Hrabal wrote an earlier version of the work that is supposed to have been intensely violent and lacking in sex. This later version, published with official sanction during the brief Czech thaw of the mid-sixties, is full of sex, as sex is the only refuge of the present, the only counterweight to death. Hrma is a perfect narrator of this work and his observations, his voice, are heartbreakingly simple and naïve. He wishes more than anything to consummate his relationship with Masha, a woman his own age and no more experienced than he is. They really have no idea of what they are doing and yet they are both determined to have sex. This groping desire is present in all of the characters, and consumes them as it would in any small town under any circumstances, but the circumstances of war tear off the cover of propriety, and render erotic secrets obsolete. The book has a humorous, slightly ironic tone, and plays the innocence of Hrma off the other men in the station to good effect. In a sense not much happens in Closely Watched Trains, but its simple plot unfolds effortlessly. It is the story of a boy who wishes to become a man and does so. The sadness that tinges the satire, the outrages of war, the death of everyone, seeps into the bones of the book. It is a wonder that a work so short can deliver so much, but in war there is no time, and this work is an example of the art of the novel in one of its many masks, perhaps its most important one, the one that documents a place and time, and allows those who were there, and those who were not, to know who they are. I have been a fan of the Central European novel more many decades now, and of war novels for a longer time. This is an outstanding example of both.