With an afterword by the Bohemian scholar Alessandro Catalano, the book that made the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal known to the general public, has finally been translated into Italian by Laura Angeloni. “Pearls of the Deep”, as it is known in English, in fact, was the 1963 debut, at the age of 49, of Hrabal, today considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. “I nailed rails, I was the stationmaster, I offered insurance policies, worked as a traveling salesman, steel worker, wastepaper packer and theatre stage technician. What I wanted was to get dirty with the environment, with ordinary people, and find myself living, every now and then, the shocking experience of seeing the pearl at the bottom of the human being”, writes Bohumil Hrabal in what can be considered the best possible presentation of this book that portrays the reality of a people and a country in the years before the “normalization” with clarity and irony.
Bohumil Hrabal,
La perlina sul fondo,
Miraggi Edizioni, 2020
256 p.
