Some people speak like writers, but the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal writes like a talker. “I inhale images and then exhale them,” he once told an interviewer. It is fitting that much of Hrabal’s prose was heard before it was read: throughout the late nineteen-forties and fifties, when Hrabal worked as a clerk, an insurance agent, a travelling salesman, a stagehand, a foundry foreman, and a compactor of wastepaper in a recycling plant, he did not publish any of his eccentric stories in mainstream venues. Instead, he read them aloud to a handful of underground literati assembled in pubs. The few works he managed to have printed appeared only in samizdat.

Hrabal could not become a full-time writer until 1962, when his émigré friends snuck some of his books overseas. He found a devoted audience abroad, and “Closely Watched Trains,” a 1965 bildungsroman about a railway worker who defies the Nazi invaders, was even adapted into a movie that was awarded the Oscar for Foreign Language Film, in 1968. That year, the Prague Spring erupted—and Hrabal, who supported the uprisings, was forced further underground. It was not until his 1976 political rehabilitation that his fiction became widely available in his native country. He has since become something of a national hero. In 2008, Milan Kundera hailed him as “our very best writer today.”

Hrabal’s rehabilitation is ongoing internationally, and this fall brings two new translations. “All My Cats,” translated by Paul Wilson, and “Why I Write?,” translated by David Short, stand like bookends at the far edges of Hrabal’s prolific career. The former is a memoir that he completed fourteen years before his death, in 1997; the latter is a collection of early experimental work that he wrote in his thirties, when he first attempted prose. On the face of it, both books are politically innocuous. In “All My Cats,” Hrabal describes how his many pet cats begin to drive him crazy. In “Why I Write?,” a motley crew of carousers play drunken pranks and tell each other wild stories. Hrabal’s characters sometimes tout the golden days of the Austrian empire, especially after a pint too many, but they do so out of nostalgia, not ideological conviction. They lament industrialization and the dissolution of the local, but they never mourn the loss of imperialism itself.

What the Czechoslovak censors found threatening about Hrabal’s prose was not its content but its form. Hrabal once called his playful style his “defence against politics,” but it was precisely his apolitical effusions that made him so politically suspect. In place of the drab realism that the regime demanded, Hrabal offered dizzying embellishments and dazzling augmentations. He drew early inspiration from the surrealists, and “Why I Write?” is peppered with references to obscure figures of the movement. But, even in his early stories, he departed from precedent to perfect the distinctive method that he called pabeni, a term that translates to something like “palavering”: roughly, the kind of meandering chatter that we engage in when we strike up conversations with strangers.

On the one hand, Hrabal’s palavering bears a direct relation to reality. He spent hours in Prague pubs collecting anecdotes, inhaling the turns of phrase that he would later exhale on the page. Several of the pieces in “Why I Write?” even feature faithful transcriptions of actual conversations. One story, “Protocol,” lists Hrabal’s Uncle Josef as its co-author. Another, “A Schizophrenic Gospel,” is dedicated to this same uncle—who appears and reappears as the lightly fictionalized and outrageously raucous Uncle Pepin throughout Hrabal’s mature oeuvre.

On the other hand, what resembles reality in Hrabal’s fiction is only its garrulous rhythms, not the outlandish claims that it reports as fact. In “Closely Watched Trains,” an amateur artist explains that he paints landscapes from postcards because, if he painted from nature, he would “have to reduce everything, instead of enlarging it.” Hrabal’s palaverers, prime among them his Uncle Pepin, always opt for enlargement. A palaverer’s stories are about as apt to be true as stories overheard at a party at 4 A.M. The point is not that they are believable, even in the fictions in which they are related: the point is that they are fun.

Hrabal’s characters share with slapstick comics a strange invulnerability: they survive the wildest exploits, eating poisonous mushrooms and weathering car explosions not only with impunity but with sunny good humor. Even death is a joke to them. In one story in “Why I Write?,” a man bursts into laughter at a relative’s funeral. In another, drunken revellers “go to the cemetery” to “wake a few corpses just for the hell of it.” (The skeletons are happy to join them for a pub crawl.) But when Hrabal confronts his own death, he writes not as a palaverer but as himself—and this time his voice quavers.

“All My Cats” was completed in 1983, when Hrabal was pushing seventy and recuperating from a bad car accident. In the book, as Hrabal teeters on the brink of old age, the ever-multiplying cats that crowd his country cottage come to constitute his last real link with life. “I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles,” he writes, “yet the cats loved me the ways girls used to love me when I was young.”

Hrabal cannot help but reciprocate his cats’ affections, but he also experiences his devotion as an entanglement. His obsession soon grows gnawing: when he is in his apartment in Prague, he cannot write for fear that his cats are lonely, yet when he returns to the countryside, he is distracted by the cats themselves. Sometimes he loses his temper and kicks one of the cats—and then he is paralyzed with regret “because I had struck a cat that I loved, I had kicked an innocent creature who meant everything to me.” When he discovers another fresh litter of kittens, he snaps. In a burst of rage, he murders the newborns, stuffing them into a mailbag and thrashing them against a tree.

Hrabal’s wife hovers in the margins of “All My Cats,” surfacing every now and then to reproach her husband for adopting more cats than he can reasonably hope to care for. But Hrabal’s most honest encounters, at least with another human, are with his deranged neighbor, who is haunted by the spectre of the country’s slaughtered cows. “What about those poor cows, Mr. Hrabal, those Chagallian cows?” the neighbor asks, apropos of nothing. He rants on: