In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia.
Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history..
He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads.
After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel.
Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia.
It is one of the great moments in his life.
Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie.
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.
In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia
