In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but  hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth  only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal  takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century  Czechoslovakia.First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times),  telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a  deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called  upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of  the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi  woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war,  through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he  reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a  millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything  and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances,  Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his  place in history.

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