Bohumil Hrabal - Foghíjak

Bohumil Hrabal, who wrote his works for the desk drawer for a long time, became a famous writer almost overnight from the mid-sixties. Writers' association member, state award-winning author. He carries the honorarium home with a shopping bag, and his novel Strictly Controlled Trains, filmed by Jiří Menzel, receives an Oscar. However, the momentum of this success story was broken on August 21, 1968, when Prague was invaded by the Russians. Hrabal is put on the list of writers under liquidation, his manuscripts are thrown back, and he also has to worry about his personal safety.
Toothless is a sequel to Házimurik and Vita nuova. With narcissistic self-irony, Hrabal discusses his human weaknesses, his self-awareness as a writer deeply imbued with incredulity, and his continuous escape from himself. He found his ideal of beauty in decay and ugliness. His cat obsession. His gall bladder operation, after which he tells himself that he will die, but first he eats some crumbly greasy bread and washes it down with rye brandy - he even hides a bottle of booze in the wild trees of the forest near their cottage, so that his lonely bike rides are not so pointless.
This autobiographical trilogy, published in the 1980s, stands out because the author sees the events from the narrator's perspective of his wife. He holds a double mirror to himself.

"the writer's books are his real children... he is not only the father, but also the mother of these little books, and more than a mother, because he is such a writer, and my husband pointed to himself, his belly and then his head, with her future child for more than nine months, and like a mother, she feels it grow inside her, how it rolls, how it kicks, and worries whether that child, that little one, will not be stupid"