Resistance, submission, and male fantasies - in Closely Watched Trains (the novella)

Book group tonight taking up Brohumil (?) Hrabal's novella "Closely Watched Trains," from the 1950s, best known to Americans from the Czech film of same name from about 1965, which won the best foreign Oscar and got Americans, at least some Americans, interested in Eastern European films - I'd seen the film pretty recently but never read the novel; the film is more or less faithful to the novel (Hrabal co-wrote the screenplay I think) - though in my memory the film ends with the death of the young hero as he sabotages the German munitions train passing through occupied Czechoslovakia - and that's not possible in the first-person narrated novella (unless it were a Latin American novella, by Aira, say). The novella, like the film, very tart and funny and sexy - gives a bit more background on the family history and somewhat less on the sexual frustrations of the hero - in the novella he attempts suicide before the action starts - the story begins with his return to work at the train station after a 3-month medical leave (we do get a series of flashbacks to the suicide attempt - breaks in the sequence but easy to follow) - it seems to me that in the film he tried to commit suicide because of his sexual frustrations whereas in the novella it's more because of his troubled family history and ostracism in the village? Not sure if my memory's correct here. My only trouble with the novella is its rampant male-centeredness (even sexism): yes it's a sexy story and yes it's no doubt accurate about the crude sexual comments of the dispatcher et al., but there's also an operative male fantasy that the women will offer themselves up to the hero (and the dispatcher) one after another - the women really don't seem to have personalities or even any discrimination, they're just bodies and available. On the positive side, the novella, like the film, is probably best appreciated as a surreptitious and bravely subversive attack on the communist regime and the Soviets - told as if it's about Czech resistance to the Nazis during WWII but obviously carrying a message about resistance during its own era - both politically and artistically. In that sense, the book is just like the characters Hrabal describes - cooperative state servants on the surface but secretly planning to blow everything to pieces.