4 ideas
Jan Dítě marries Líza, a German woman, after a Nazi medical board certifies him fit to wed an Aryan. The communist regime then confiscates it, and he insists on being interned with the other millionaires, only to find they reject him as a fraudulent upstart.
Dítě is physically tiny and socially invisible, and nearly every choice he makes aims to be seen as big: flashier money, grander hotels, a higher class of company. Because his self-worth lives entirely in other people's eyes, whichever regime rules decides his dignity, making him complicit with Nazis and communists in turn. Only when all audiences are gone does the craving lose its hold.
His proof is that he served the King of England, and he claims he can read each guest's origin and order at a glance. Seen from the service floor, the powerful appear through their appetites, vanities and tips, so grand history becomes a sequence of banquets, bribes and petty humiliations.
The recurring refrain "the unbelievable came true" treats fortune and ruin as products of the same arbitrary historical forces, not of merit. Dítě is sent to mend a road in an abandoned border region with only animals for company. There, losing wealth, status and audience lets him face his own mortality and write his story with an equanimity his success never gave him.