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Rating: 
Summary: A bittersweet picture of losing innocence
Review: A basis for a 1967 Oscar winning movie (dir. jiri Menzel) Hrabal's book is drawing a parallel between the loss of innocence of a youth Milos Hrma, and the Czech people during WW II. The experiences of Milos, an apprentice with a small railway station in the middle of Bohemia, tells you more about the role of Czech people, collaborateurs, middlemen, resistors, under the German occupation than an Encyclopedia. Beautifully written, in the best Central European tradition of irony and self-deprecation.
Rating:
Summary: Closely Watched Trains is a recommended Hrabal work.
Review: A classic work, true to Hrabal's technique of penetrating deep into the psyche of a "little person," who is seemingly unimportant, but reflects a whole society. The ending of the book is different than the movie, with an amazing, and complex moment of acceptance and accusation both, as Czech and German lay dying together. Hrabal's symbolism compresses surreal poetry and social codes together, and like "Too Loud a Solitude" this slender book can say a lot more than many bigger ones.
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Summary: A Beautiful Story Beautifully Told
Review: Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Train is a beautiful book whose lingering impact on the reader is greater than one would suspect from looking at its length - 85 pages. It is the story of a young man, Milos Hrma, an apprentice signalman in a Czech village railway station during WWII. The term closely "watched trains" refers to German military (soliers, prisoners, and munitions) trains that must be watched, tracked closely to ensure a smooth passage. Failure results in close (and often deadly) scrutiny by the Gestapo. As the story it unfolds that young Milos had recently attempted suicide after his first sexual experience ends disastrously. The scars on his wrist reflect the internal scars and humiliation suffered as a result of his sexual failure. The rest of the book focuses on his desire to achieve manhood, by means of a succesful sexual conquest or through some "other" means. Milos' quest is ultimately succesful yet with tragic consequences. An act of simple heroism marks the story's climax. Along the way Milos has a near fatal encounter with a Gestapo officer after an incident involving a closely watched train. The understated description of this encounter is a brilliant piece of writing as the officer and Milos closely watch each other's scars before the officer decides to spare his life. The above summary does not do justice to the concise, sparse tone of Hrabal's prose that conveys great depths of meaning in the course of the story's simple narrative. This is a beautiful story, beautifully told. I also recommend the movie (available on Amazon)after reading the book. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1966. The screenplay was written by Hrabal and altough not totally faithful to the book's narrative it is well acted and serves as a nice complement to the book. I strongly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Story Beautifully Told
Review: Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Train is a beautiful book whose lingering impact on the reader is greater than one would suspect from looking at its length - 85 pages. It is the story of a young man, Milos Hrma, an apprentice signalman in a Czech village railway station during WWII. The term closely "watched trains" refers to German military (soliers, prisoners, and munitions) trains that must be watched, tracked closely to ensure a smooth passage. Failure results in close (and often deadly) scrutiny by the Gestapo. As the story it unfolds that young Milos had recently attempted suicide after his first sexual experience ends disastrously. The scars on his wrist reflect the internal scars and humiliation suffered as a result of his sexual failure. The rest of the book focuses on his desire to achieve manhood, by means of a succesful sexual conquest or through some "other" means. Milos' quest is ultimately succesful yet with tragic consequences. An act of simple heroism marks the story's climax. Along the way Milos has a near fatal encounter with a Gestapo officer after an incident involving a closely watched train. The understated description of this encounter is a brilliant piece of writing as the officer and Milos closely watch each other's scars before the officer decides to spare his life. The above summary does not do justice to the concise, sparse tone of Hrabal's prose that conveys great depths of meaning in the course of the story's simple narrative. This is a beautiful story, beautifully told. I also recommend the movie (available on Amazon)after reading the book. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1966. The screenplay was written by Hrabal and altough not totally faithful to the book's narrative it is well acted and serves as a nice complement to the book. I strongly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: a subtle portrait of youth diminishing
Review: do you remember, as a child, watching trains pass by? i'm guessing that you counted every car, reading the words on some; looking in the windows of others. this, to me, could stand as the definition for innocence and it feels as if the adult counter part of this process lies somewhere inside milos hrma, the narrator of hrabal's novella. milos is a young railroad apprentice who insulates himself against the reality of world war ii. he cowers when faced with authority and he fears that he is impotent. those fears are eventually silenced as he confronts a trainload of nazis and realizes the consequences of war. he lays bleeding and gripping the hand of a dead german soldier, who is both his victim and his murderer. hrabal has written an understated and poetic tale of german-occupied czechoslovakia that lives in your mind long after the eighty-five pages are read.
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Summary: The Human Tragi-Comedy
Review: Hrabal's short novella "Closely Observed Trains" (the title under which it is published in Britain)is set in a railway station in a small town in Czechoslovakia in the winter of 1945. Although the war is coming to an end, the country is still under German occupation, and the book's title refers to the special military trains which need to be kept under close guard as they travel to the front.
The central character, Milos Hrma, is a young apprentice traffic controller, and the opening scenes of the book tend towards the comic, as Milos describes the attempts of his colleagues to get on with their everyday lives, seemingly oblivious to the historic events taking place around them. Milos's boss, Station-Master Lansky, is a ridiculous figure, obsessed with promoting himself both in the social hierarchy (he lays claim to aristocratic lineage) and in the hierarchy of the Czech railway system. Despite his eagerness for promotion, however, he pays more attention to his hobby of pigeon breeding than he does to the requirements of his job. Lansky's subordinate, Dispatcher Hubicka, is equally neglectful of his duties, although his main obsession is pursuing women; he is facing disciplinary proceedings for the offence of misusing Government property by using the station's official stamps to decorate the backside of an attractive young female telegraphist.
As the story progresses, it takes on a darker tone. We learn that Milos has recently returned to work after three months in hospital following an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. The cause of this attempt was depression brought on by impotence and his inability to consummate his relationship with his girlfriend. The latter part of the book has two themes- his continuing obsession with losing his virginity and the plot he forms with Hubicka to help the Czech Resistance by destroying one of the Germans' special trains.
The expression "tragi-comedy" is perhaps over-used in literary criticism, being all too often a category to enable the lazy critic to pigeonhole works that resist neat pigeonholing- certain of Shakespeare's plays, for example. It seems to me, however, that the adjective "tragi-comic" is indeed an appropriate one to use about "Closely Observed Trains" because of the contrast between the tragic situation of the Czech people under the German occupation and the many comic incidents that take place, such as Hubicka's adventures with the telegraphist, or Lansky's habit of shouting his criticism of the morals of society down the ventilation shaft in the station kitchen. The same incident, indeed, may have both comic and serious overtones, as when Lansky, in protest against the German invasion of Poland, kills his German pigeons and replaces them with Polish ones- an act both cruel and ridiculous. The book is full of gruesome but absurd details, such as the three dead horses thrown from a train and left by the railway lines. This is a book of less than a hundred pages, but Hrabal is able to fill that space with a fantastic amount of detail, both trivial and serious.
The central theme of the book is the various strategies people use to survive in the tragic circumstances of war and occupation- courageous acts of resistance, petty acts of defiance (such as using the metal from a downed German plane to roof rabbit-hutches and chicken-coops) and continuing to pursue the trivia of existence. Sometimes they use a mixture of all three. One can easily see why the Communist authorities disliked Hrabal's work; they had no objection to tales of heroic deeds in the fight against fascism, but these had to be viewed through the simplistic ideology of Marxism-Leninsm and placed in the context of the class struggle. Hrabal's world was more complex and less ideological. There is a place for courage in that world, but also a place for compromise and for the apolitical details of everyday life. Seen in this context, Milos's bravery seems both more impressive and the book's ending more poignant. This is a fine piece of writing and, given that it was written under Communist rule, a brave one.
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Summary: Closely Read
Review: Hrabal's technique in pulling storylines together and contrasting characters is phenomenal. From the shyness (despite his authoritative account and command of memory) of Hrma (not forgetting the pun on his name which this review can't include) to the sly, sexual prowess of his workmate to the illusional but hysterical stationmaster with his flocks of pigeons, two uniforms, bad timing and propensity to register complaints down an airshaft rather than face to face with his wife (who'll hit him) or employees who would probably turn a deaf ear...Hrabal also includes women who are desirable, able to move around and escape the gravity of their predicament under a discombobulated but still-lethal Nazi rule. The associations of Hrma, that a limeworker is 'god' after the rescue from a suicide attempt
to horses' corpses at the side of the tracks that offer him a reprieve after a brush with death at the hand of the Germans, are sharper as the book continues to an end that isn't so much conclusive as it is necessary to identify with the character and nature of the time.
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Summary: Heroism of common people
Review: This is a tale about heroism of ordinary people, not about epic feats. You won't find here but common people, and that's what makes the tale so touching and realistic. The book is beautiful and is beautifully written, with a sober yet elegant and poetic style. The trains are an essential part of all the characters'lives in their jobs and their personal memories, and are related to the fight of Czechs partisans at the end of the II World War, which is the time the novel is placed. The novel is both dramatic and comic, and Hrabal's sense of humour is one of his most remarkable features, following the best tradition of Czech's Literature, particularly Jaroslav Hasek. The mixture of drama and comedy, as well as the human touch and tenderness which envelops the characters makes this novel very moving to every reader. This work is a little and brilliant jewel, definitely worth the trouble reading.
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