‘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, we were looking at post-socialist cities, abandoned dams, electricity infrastructure reclaimed by vegetation, the emotional weight of living inside systems that were built for a different political moment and never quite updated. I realised that ruins are not endpoints but ongoing processes, layered, accumulated over time, never quite finished. And Hrabal walked back in through a door I had not anticipated.

This time, he brought something different with him.

The railway station I had read about as a backdrop for comedy now looked like something else entirely. It was an infrastructure carrying history in its body. It was a system built under one political order, run by another, and inhabited by people who had no say in either transition. Milos’s father, lying on the couch, retired and immobile, suddenly made a different kind of sense. His grandfather, crushed by the tanks, made a different kind of sense. These were not just family quirks that Hrabal was gently mocking. They were people ruined by the gap between the world they had been built for and the world that actually arrived.

I had never thought about the book this way before. Not once.

Inhabiting incompleteness

What surprised me was how much this new reading did not write off the old one. The humour was still there. But now I could see that the humour was itself a response to ruination, a way of inhabiting incompleteness without being destroyed by it. Hrabal’s characters do not wait for the system to be repaired before they allow themselves to feel things or want things or be ridiculous. They live fully inside the wreckage. That is not a small thing.

It made me think about India almost immediately. The affairs of daily life around infrastructure at home are unmistakable: railway stations that are simultaneously sources of national pride and sites of visible inequality and neglect, systems that were built for certain purposes and have accumulated so many layers of use and misuse and adaptation that they now mean something completely different to different people. There is something deeply Hrabalian in all of that. Life finds its shape in the margins of systems that were never quite designed for the people actually using them.

The academic frameworks gave me a new vocabulary for this. Ruination as process, infrastructural emotions, the post-socialist temporality of being simultaneously behind and ahead. But Hrabal gave me the feeling underneath the vocabulary. The two things needed each other in a way I had not thought of when the course began.

What I keep thinking about now is how a book can wait for you. I thought I had read Hrabal. I thought I knew what he was offering. But I had only found one layer of it, the layer I was ready for at that point in my life. The course unravelled another layer entirely, one that had been sitting there the whole time, patient, in the same pages I had already turned.

That is a strange and genuinely good feeling. Like finding a corner in a house you thought you already knew.

Ravi Shankar Shukla is a 2012 batch IAS Officer from the Jharkhand cadre, currently pursuing an MSc at the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford.