‘Closely Watched Trains’: The humour in Bohumil Hrabal’s 1965 novella is a response to ruination

I first read the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains two years ago. I remember reading it in bits and pieces, not all at once, taking my time with five to ten pages at a time, laughing inside, then feeling quietly sad, and then laughing again. This became the pattern. In the months that followed, whenever something absurd happened around me, whenever the gap between how things were supposed to work and how they actually did manifested, I found myself thinking about Milos Hrma and the little railway station. Hrabal had given me a language for a certain kind of everyday ridiculousness. I kept coming back to that.

The comedy of small people

But it was mostly the humour I returned to. The comedy of small people inside large systems. The rubber stamp on the wrong surface. The grandfather was walking in front of tanks with his hands outstretched. I had read it as a book about absurdity, about survival through laughter, about the stubbornness of ordinary human life. I thought I knew what the book was doing.

However, while taking the Urban Infrastructure Futures elective during my MSc course at Oxford University this year, something completely unexpected occurred. While studying ruination as a theoretical concept,...

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