What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’

Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote. There is a comedy, and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large (‘for all mankind’) that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the ‘tiny black cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism. And isn’t that phrase ‘tiny black cloud’ done with great finesse? It hints at a man whose sense of himself has so swelled that he now sees himself geographically, like a darkened area experiencing a bout of low pressure on a weather-map of Europe. ‘Tiny’, above all: a marvellous word, because it suggests that this man, while possibly proud of his handicap, might also disdain it, or believe that he could just brush it away whenever he wanted and get on with the business of doing great things.

Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence by the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997. The character relieving himself of this little confession is a garrulous cobbler, who admits to being ‘an admirer of the European Renaissance’, and is the narrator of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. But many of Hrabal’s comic heroes are equally talkative. There is Hanta, the narrator of Too Loud a Solitude, who has been compacting waste for 35 years, and educating himself on the sly using the great books he rescues from the trash. He wanted to grow up to be a millionaire, he tells us, so that he could buy ‘phosphorescent hands for all the city clocks’ in Prague. Now he reads his rescued Kant and Novalis, and dreams of going on holiday to Greece, where he would like to visit Stagira, ‘the birthplace of Aristotle, I’d run around the track at Olympia, run in my underwear’. Hanta doesn’t take baths because he suspects them of spreading disease, ‘but sometimes, when a yearning for the Greek ideal of beauty comes over me, I’ll wash one of my feet or maybe even my neck.’

And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia – but sometimes he says something wise or prescient, and whenever he is complimented for this, he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’ And there is Milos Hrma, the young, timid railway signalman in Hrabal’s most famous novel, Closely Observed Trains. When he discovers that the stationmaster may become an Inspector of State Railways, he is excited, and reverently asks: ‘An inspector, like that ... that’s the same rank on the railways as a major in the Army, isn’t it?’ Yes, it is, says the stationmaster. ‘Ah, and then,’ Hrma cries, ‘instead of the three small stars you’ll have just one, but bordered with the inspector’s field!’