First published in Czech in 1964, it consists of a single sprawling sentence delivered by a seventy-year-old cobbler, raconteur and shameless flirt who wanders through decades of memory without ever stopping to catch his breath.

A conversation with a group of young women becomes a torrent of anecdotes, boasts, digressions, inventions and recollections. The old man moves effortlessly between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, war, politics, sex, work and absurdity, constructing a life from fragments and embellishments. Hrabal turns gossip into philosophy and memory into performance. The pleasure of the book lies not in where it is going but in the sheer momentum of the telling.

Hrabal remains one of the essential figures of twentieth-century European literature, admired by writers including Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and John Banville. His work occupies a strange territory between oral storytelling, modernism and comic absurdism. In Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age that sensibility reaches perhaps its purest form: a novel that feels less written than spoken into existence.

The translation by Michael Henry Heim captures the musicality and velocity of Hrabal's prose beautifully, while the inclusion of Vladimir Suchánek's lithographs gives this Harvill edition an added charm.

Harvill Press paperback edition. Good condition with light shelf wear and clean internals.