Prose

Harlequin’s Millions is set in a castle converted into a home for the elderly, whose eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants exchange phantasmagoric stories about their lives and their changing country in an attempt to uphold sight of the world outside their confinement. Hrabal uses his aging protagonists to tell of Nymburk, the small Czech town in which he grew up, and explore the mythologizing power of memory. Poised on the threshold between joy and melancholy, this novel admits us into the mind of a woman coming to terms with the passing of time. Stacey Knecht’s translation brilliantly conveys Hrabal’s winding ecstatic sentences that capture the author’s flowing conversational style, described by James Wood as “anecdote without end”.