If there is something Czech literature can be proud of, it is the quality of its books for children and young adults, which combine excellent artwork and literature. This month’s feature presents some of the best titles published at the end of 2014 and through 2015 — from fairy tales to art history, murder mysteries to avant-garde language games. For more Czech books for children and young adults we recommend having a read through the Golden Ribbon Award winners and the books selected for the Best Children’s Books project. We hope you enjoy our selection. As everyone knows, the best books for children are also great literature for adults!

Contents

Olga Černá: This is Prague

Miloš Kratochvíl: Prisoners of the Silver Sun

Lenka Brodecká: The Search for a Star

Jana Šrámková: Susie in the Gardens

Ondřej Horák: Why Paintings Don’t Need Names

Daniela Fischerová: Deformatory

Daniela Krolupperová: A Crime in Prague’s Old Town

Ivan Wernisch: Plop! The Lebott’s Korc Unscrooed, He Upguzzeled Liqueur

Olga Černá & Michaela Kukovičová

This is Prague
To je Praha

(Baobab, 60 pages)

Age: 5+

Although exile-based author of picture books for children, Miroslav Šašek (1916–1980), was a native of the city of Prague, he was not recognised in his homeland until the 21st century. Having published his essential collection of guides to the world’s nineteen big cities, which in their time entertained youngest readers on all continents, Šašek’s grandniece Olga Černá – co-founder of the foundation bearing the artist’s name – decided to author the never-written tribute to Prague, employing Šašek’s typical condensed style. Accompanied by a stray dog and a couple of skateboarding kids, she examines the magic of the Mother of All Cities in a way that is sure to please all structuralists: dealing with it one topic at a time. Michaela Kukovičová, whose collage-like view of reality is interspersed with naivist drawings, provides the city’s star-clad fame with a more civil outline. After all, it does boast the world’s largest castle in regular use, it used to host Stalin’s most appalling monument, Kafka’s beetle by the name of Gregor Samsa crawled along its streets, Golem strode in its alleyways and a special type of sandwich, “chlebíček”, was born here a hundred years ago. The publisher, Baobab, has also released an English edition of the book translated by Justin Quinn.

Praise

“With her original artistic style, Michaela Kukovičová has perfectly captured the atmosphere of various places in Prague and Olga Černá, Šašek’s grandniece, has created texts tailored for children which adults will also enjoy reading.”

— Johana Labanczová, iLiteratura

Links

Publisher: www.baobab-books.net

Excerpt from the English edition

Miloš Kratochvíl & Iku Dekune

Prisoners of the Silver Sun
Zajatci stříbrného slunce

(Triton, 98 pages)

Age: 6+

In this prose the seasoned author delivers a surprising message and lets us wonder what genre for young readers he has created this time. The dystopian variation conjures up a world in which computer-game backdrops materialise into reality. A six-year-old boy named Mark, who lives in the near future, gets a DVD from his father with a game called The City, and becomes addicted to it. Eventually he manages to destroy the City and still have one or two lives left, despite his family’s frequent reproaches that games should not be played for the joy of killing. In a dream, Mark suddenly finds himself within the City’s ruins, guided by a little boy whom he had wounded with three shots. Mark, who is responsible for all the destruction, now ponders the City’s ruins and the disk of the silver sun, which rises above the rebuilt metropolis, and children and adults alike are faced with a disquieting question concerning the limits of the virtual world. Iku Dekune’s charming illustrations stand out as faithful representations of a child’s imagination.

Praise

“Miloš Kratochvíl’s book is unique both because of its text and its illustrations by Japanese artist Iku Dekune… I’d be surprised if this exceptional book didn’t win the children’s book of the year award.”

— Mik Herman, čítárny.cz

Links

Publisher: www.tridistri.cz

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

Hopmix

“You weren’t naughty, were you? You didn’t drag Max out of his kennel when he wanted to sleep?”
“No,” said Mark, shaking his head.
“Good,” said Dad, patting him on the head, his other hand held behind his back.
“In that case you deserve a reward.”
“Hopmix?!” Mark leapt up from the armchair.
Hopmix was a smooth, elastic ball that you slammed onto the ground, and as it bounced up it turned into something that jumps. Hopmix 5 could transform into a hare, a frog, a kangaroo, a flea or a figure skater. Little children played with it by guessing what it would change into on the rebound. The person who got it right most times was the winner. But older boys soon learned how to throw the hopmix so that they could get three kangaroos in a row. You could learn the trick and hopmix stopped being a hit.

But Mark wanted one anyway. He used to have a hopmix, but one day that one had bounced up and changed into a butterfly and flown away through the window. He never found it again. And nobody believed that that was how he had lost it.
“Why couldn’t something different happen for a change?” Mark had protested.
Dad assured him that it couldn’t, and Mum repeated to him that hopmix was only able to take the form of five creatures: a hare, a frog, a kangaroo, a flea or a figure skater. They told him not to lie, that it would be better to confess where he had lost it.

Mark wanted a new hopmix mainly so that he could make sure he hadn’t dreamt the whole thing up. So that he could prove that sometimes something totally unexpected can happen… In his mind’s eye he kept seeing the hopmix changing into a butterfly and fluttering out through the open window.
“Enough about hopmix!” laughed Dad, handing him a DVD of a computer game.

The Game without a Name

On the cover was a strange town. Odd, splendid, but almost entirely hidden beneath clouds of smoke. Some of the buildings were on fire, and golden flashes of gunfire tore through the smoke above the town. In the distance the turrets of a castle pierced the red and purple sky.
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t know. I don’t speak English,” his father shrugged. “Maybe The City. Or The Castle…”
Mark was in the first year of school. He did English, but it was more like playing at learning. He remembered how funny it was when Pěchouček read “vole” instead of “love”, and similar gems. “But how do you play it?” he asked.
“Like all shoot-em-ups. Either you shoot them or they shoot you,” said Dad, winking at him. “I only know that you have ten lives – that’s what the shop assistant said. That should be enough, right?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“When I have time, I’ll have a go at it myself.” His father nodded at him and off he went with Max the dachshund to check that Mark really had behaved himself. That meant that he hadn’t damaged anything in the garden with his ball or trampled on the flowers by the pond with the goldfish in it.

“Max, track!” he hissed and the dog lowered his muzzle to the ground.
Even though the dachshund was Mark’s friend, it was his father who was his master, and Max had betrayed Mark several times. He led Dad to the thuja tree in which Mark had hidden his hazel rod with a piece of fishing line and a small cork float. There was no hook on the line. Mark just tied worms onto the line with a knot so that the goldfish wouldn’t pierce their mouths. But Dad wasn’t happy about it.
“They’re defenceless and when you do that you’re hurting them.”
“I’m not hurting them,” protested Mark. “We’re just playing. I like how they pull the float under the water. They usually suck the worm from the line. Or I throw it to them anyway.” But Dad disagreed. “You’re teasing them, and that isn’t a game!”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Lenka Brodecká & Tereza Ščerbová

The Search for a Star
Hledá se hvězda

(Host, 232 pages)

Age: 7+

An exceptional fairy tale by today’s standards, featuring an original parable of the struggle between good and evil. A princess and her lone royal father find hope in a bright star appearing over their kingdom on the day of the queen’s demise. One day the star vanishes and its loss adopts a deeper significance, as it had the ability to turn evil beings into stones, which were then hurled into the Devil’s Canyon. Immediately, darkness reclaims the land and the malice of some of the castle’s inhabitants is thriving. Their evil intentions are revealed by two non-adult heroes: the princess and a newly appointed little jester. Younger school children will find the story’s various twists breathtaking, including the final thrilling showdown in the form of a battle for the kingdom’s deliverance. Their experience will be underpinned by Tereza Ščerbová’s illustrations, whose pen-drawings skilfully blend with page-wide illustrations, gently complementing the book’s melancholic feel.

Trailer

Praise

“This adventure detective story is full of surprises. It slowly draws the reader in deeper and deeper. In the end nothing is certain and the adult characters, which surround the little Princess, show how much love and desire can affect people.”

— Jana Zítková, iLiteratura

Links

Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

The Day Before

At dawn he crossed over the border into the kingdom of the Shining Stars. He was travelling alone and on foot. It is difficult to say whether he was a boy or a man, but those who came across him on his journey claimed that he was a jester, because he was wearing a red outfit with a jagged hem, a horned hat, and long narrow boots with curled toes. He was carrying a red knapsack on his back.

In the afternoon he stopped and sat down on a small tussock, laid out a cloth napkin on his lap and ate a modest lunch. He seemed to be deep in thought. Then he pulled out a large notebook from his knapsack and wrote something down. He looked up at the sky and soon continued on his way. Tomorrow he would be kneeling before the local king.

The Princess

The princess awoke in the morning, stretched and put on her pink slippers. What a day it’s going to be today! she thought excitedly. And she ran straight to the window. She looked out at the zigzagging path which led to the outer gate of the castle, but so far nothing, no-one in sight. So, time to wash, get dressed and brush her hair. The door to the bathroom banged shut.

The princess’s name was Princess. Honestly. Her mother had given her the name. She had also given her her looks – a round face, golden hair and a mischievous glint in her eye. All of those who remembered the queen were astonished by the likeness, but Princess didn’t remember her mother. She knew what she looked like from pictures, and they had also told her that her mother was very kind and courageous, but Princess had no idea that she had the same laugh as her, that they both liked to gaze into the distance and dream, and that if something strange should suddenly happen, she would cover her mouth with both her hands, just like her mother. No-one told Princess this – even though her father was still around and perhaps also someone else who loved these similarities.

Princess gave herself a cursory wash, got dressed in the twinkling of an eye and was soon back at the window surveying the winding path. At the same time her nimble fingers braided a plait which fell over her shoulder – it was already half a metre long and the same amount of hair remained. The path to the castle was still empty. Princess didn’t like it – the sun was already high above the trees and was beginning to heat up, so where was everyone? A pair of white doves flew around the window. Princess sighed and carried on with her braiding.

Just when it seemed to her that a traveller had appeared on the road far off in the distance, someone knocked on the door to her pink chamber. It was the master of ceremonies in his festive beret. He poked his head inside and wished Princess a good morning.

Princess turned towards him eagerly. “Well, are they here yet? How many of them are there?”

“No-one has arrived yet, Your Highness,” replied the master of ceremonies. “But no doubt they will be arriving presently. But now you ought to come for breakfast as quickly as you can. The king sends word that your cocoa is getting cold.”

“But what about this?” said Princess, showing him her half-finished plait.

The master of ceremonies gave a look of despair. “I don’t know, how about something like this…” He handed Princess the red portfolio he was holding under his arm, and where the plait ended he tied the hair into a double fisherman’s knot.

“Wonderful idea, Master of Ceremonies!” said Princess, laughing, and she ran off to the dining room.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Jana Šrámková & Andrea Tachezy

Susie in the Gardens
Zuza v zahradách

(Labyrint/Raketa, 64 pages)

Age: 5+

It is encouraging to see the many stories authored by young writers drawing their inspiration from nature and its various forms. Jana Šrámková sets her narrative about little Susie in an urban gardening colony. Although many such places have disappeared under new construction, the garden frequented by Susie and her parents is still inhabited by a colourful array of diligent vegetable- and flower-growers. One neglected plot of land, belonging to Old Bella and her black dog, sticks out from the rest. It looks appealingly dissolute and gradually reveals some of its secrets, which enter the sphere of the little girl’s dreams. Susie used to have a key to one of the garden’s trees – its name remains a mystery even to her peers, for whom the reading of this book will amount to a refreshing outdoors expedition.

Trailer

Praise

“Jana Šrámková has written a number of books for children showing her sensitivity for language and atmosphere. The short story Susie in the Gardens also displays a close connection with Andrea Tachezy’s illustrations: the result is a charming and exciting book which is especially suited for beginner readers.”

— Pavel Mandys, iLiteratura

Links

Publisher: www.labyrint.net

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

This is the garden. It doesn’t have a name.
Gardens don’t usually have names. “Come on,
Susie, let’s go to the garden,” calls Dad.
And off they go. It’s not too far to cycle.

In the garden there is a red watering can,
tomato plants, an apple tree, a plum tree,
a metal bathtub and a chair in a garden shed.
But most importantly in the garden there is Susie.
Otherwise, what would be the point of it?

And there are other gardens here, more
and more of them in long rows.
No two of them are the same.
The allotments are like an atlas of gardens.

Why does Susie go for walks with her dad
around the allotments? Because Dad knows all
the trees and flowers and birds, and Mum needs
to rest for a while. Susie holds his hand,
Susie asks questions, Susie chatters, but then
tiredness suddenly hits her
and they walk along quietly.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Ondřej Horák & Jiří Franta

Why Paintings Don’t Need Names
Proč obrazy nepotřebují názvy

(Labyrint/Raketa, 96 pages)

Age: 10+

One weekend Emma and Nick find out from their grandparents that the world “gallery” applies not only to contemporary shopping temples of consumerism, but also to friendly institutions, which accommodate children’s inherent need to ask, search and think. This year’s Magnesia Litera and Golden Ribbon-winning book uses dialogue-based prose, interlaced with gripping comic-book sequences, to turn exhibition spaces into frolicsome playgrounds that help humanise the forbidding sphere of “modern art”. An experienced advocate of art has joined forces with a notable protagonist of the comic-book circles to create a lovably condensed literary form, combining debates on art-history with light parody and live broadcast of a burglary involving Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square. The book includes information summarising main artists, schools, approaches, painting techniques, as well as some of the best-known cases of art theft, giving older school children a better understanding of why an original, and the originality of an artist’s vision, mean so much to us.

Praise

“This book can be more informative for readers than many general introductory texts about art history or theory.”

— Klára Kubíčková, idnes.cz

Awards

• 2015 Magnesia Litera – For children and youth
• 2015 Golden Ribbon Award – Art section: Non-fiction for children and youth
• 2015 White Ravens

Links

Publisher: www.labyrint.net

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

“Granny, how are paintings actually made?”

“It’s quite simple. Artists normally use canvas or paper. But it doesn’t really make any difference – you can use anything you can paint on. You also need to have something to paint with: brushes, paints, maybe an artist’s palette. But you know what? That’s not really important – for example, you can make a picture in the snow with your finger, on the wall with spray paint or on the pavement with chalk. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about what you create. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

“And what about that stand Grandpa has in the cellar?”

“An easel. And a straw hat on your head, paint all over your hands… You know, that’s more just a notion people have about how an artist should look. The truth is that you don’t even need an easel. You can just put the canvas on the ground or on a table. What I mean is: there’s no such thing as the correct equipment or correct appearance for an artist. I know a painter who looks like an office worker, and an office worker who looks like a painter. Just take a look at that painting.”

“That painting’s so big that I can’t look at anything else anyway.”

“Jackson Pollock placed the canvas on the floor, threw away his paintbrush and poured the paint on straight from the tin. He created totally new works of art which continue to fascinate people today, and he didn’t need to have a beret on his head, or a palette, brushes or an easel.”

“That’s cool. But I’m afraid that when I move on from this painting to the next one I’ll forget about it. That after a while I won’t even remember that I saw it and how much I liked it.”

“It only seems that way to you. Powerful things remain inside you forever. And some works of art have that power. You have them inside you and they affect you without you even knowing about it. For the whole of your life.”

“Do you have them inside you?”

“Of course. But don’t think about it as if it was a roll inside your stomach.”

“Hmm, I don’t know, maybe there isn’t enough room inside me,” laughed Mikuláš, and he ran over to the handrail from which you could look down on the floor below and the whole of the gallery.

“You have to believe in it all at least a little bit, as a wise man once said,” added Granny.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Daniela Fischerová & Jitka Petrová

Deformatory
Pohoršovna

(Mladá fronta, 120 pages)

Age: 8+

This original children’s story is a Golden Ribbon winner in the children’s prose category and draws on the current popularity of magic-school narratives, but transforms imported fantasy models through comically turning the tables. In the land of the despotic ruler Cruelhead there is a reformatory institution for maladjusted spooks who, rather than harming people, suffer from various embarrassing forms of niceness and perverse kind-heartedness. Unless the whip of Malefica Grudgeberth is quick enough to intervene, these beings could easily turn into doctors without borders or guide dogs. Recruiting from gabbling “dorcs”, “lampires”, who spend nights reading books, and the little-promising “imp in development”, will they eventually conform to the deformatory’s code of conduct? Only the Fairy Godson, an inconspicuous little boy, sees what is going on due to his soothsaying gift. Daniela Fischerová’s masterful use of language, supported by situation humour, a pleasant helping of disorderliness and Jitka Petrová’s dynamic illustrations, leads junior-school children to the conclusion that both people and fairy-tale creatures should strive for the reconciliation of our two worlds.

Praise

„An incredibly funny story which you will read in one sitting. The author, Daniela Fisherová, skilfully plays with the Czech language, she looks into the intestines of every word and transforms them into new, unexpected meanings which move the story forward.“

— Jana Vyskotová, Kultura21.cz

Awards

• 2015 Golden Ribbon Award – Literary section: Literature for children
• 2015 White Ravens

Links

Publisher: www.mf.cz

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

The Will-O’-The-Wisp’s Story about the Idiot Cruelhead

(Marginal note: This is how the tale entered Moiris’s memory, and because of all the reading he does, Moiris’s memory is rather bookish. Wanda didn’t say “pain in the posterior”, because nobody would actually say that, but “pain in the butt”, “spaced-out expression” and so on. So here we present the account from Moiris’s memory.)

I mooched around the town, but it was a pain in the posterior, because I was bored stiff. As if to spite me, nobody went astray – even the foreigners zoomed along as if they were on rails, and that’s a nuisance for a will-o’-the-wisp. Night fell and there was no-one to be seen, just dense darkness.

I was ready to call it a night when King Cruelhead stumbled out of a bar. He was wearing his crown all lopsided. The gleaming royal wheels were parked outside. Surely that fool didn’t intend to drive? I was horrified. Of course he did, even though he’d had a skinful. I know that look very well, because it’s exactly the one people get when they step on a stray root. They get that dazed expression and start tripping up over their own feet.

Enough! I exclaimed in my head, and perhaps even out loud, but the king was oblivious to me. He staggered over to the golden car, took the golden keys out of his golden pocket and… Whack! I struck him across the hand. His head didn’t register what had happened. He shouted Ow! and dropped the keys into the gutter. Plop!

There was a taxi on the corner and its lovely driver, Jarda, was having fifty winks with his head resting on the steering wheel. Incidentally, Jarda is really great, and if I weren’t a will-o’-the-wisp but an ordinary girl… Oh, well.

Cruelhead fell into the taxi like a sack of coal into a cellar. Jarda woke up and the king roared: “Libeň, and quickly!” In case you don’t know, Libeň is a city district. Cruelhead has a sister in Libeň, old Roundworm Cruelhead, and he wanted to stay over at her place, since he didn’t have his car keys. But Jarda was still half asleep, and instead of “Libeň, and quickly!” he heard “Lean in and kiss me!” He had no desire to give that drunkard a kiss, but he was afraid to disobey the king. So he leaned over and gave him a tiny little peck somewhere on the ear. Now, if I weren’t a will-o’-the-wisp but an ordinary girl… Oh, well.

The king got such a fright that the crown slipped off his head. “How dare you, you gammy caterpillar, you grubby worm? I am the king and I will have you drawn and quartered!”

Jarda turned pale. I’d had enough. I gave Cruelhead such a slap that he rolled out head first. I am invisible only to humans, and Cruelhead is a Fiend. But he was so befuddled by the drink that he wouldn’t have seen me if I had bitten him on the nose. I whispered to Jarda: “Go!” He had no idea who had said it – he probably believed that it was his own idea – but he stepped on the gas and was gone.

I went up behind the king and whispered: “Go to the corner, then turn left… There’s a lamp-post there, bump right into it!” (Wanda said this in a muttering, mumbling voice like a sat nav.) I led him towards a stray skip. Just so you know, in the woods I have stray rocks and stray roots and in towns stray skips and forgetting benches. Whoever touches the skip has to return to it three times, and whoever sits on the bench immediately forgets where he wanted to go. Cruelhead almost lost his mind – no matter where he went, he found himself back at the skip again. He banged his head against it in his fury. Towards morning I took pity on him. I took him to a forgetting bench, and he stretched out and slept.

At eight o’clock the police woke him up and wanted to see his ID card. They thought he was a homeless person, because he had lost his crown and he hadn’t the faintest idea what his name was. Yup, the forgetting bench really does work wonders. The policeman took him down to the station. There Cruelhead finally remembered that he was a king. He shouted: “I’ll have you drawn and quartered!” That is, he wanted to say “drawn and quartered”, but he tripped over his tongue and ended up shouting something like: “Drrrnaw! Qrrtuard!” The policeman tapped their foreheads and this sent the king into a terrible rage.

Then Roundworm came to get him, and apparently she gave him a spanking right there in the police station, because she was the only one who wasn’t afraid of Cruelhead. She had looked after him when he was young, and she is also a Fiend, which means that the king couldn’t have her drawn and quartered. Oh yes, and Jarda turned the golden crown in to the police. It didn’t even occur to him to prise at least one ruby off it. Have I already mentioned that Jarda is great? Oh, I have. If I weren’t a will-o’-the-wisp but an ordinary girl… Oh, well.

Wanda Puts a Spell on a Chair

Moiris said: “That was a nice story!” But the will-o’-the-wisp stuck her tongue out at him and turned away.

The twins looked this way and that and didn’t know what to say. Murdalotte (a soft-hearted whimperer) whimpered soft-heartedly at the idea of her dear father banging his head on the skip, but deep within her belly there was a teensy little place where she silently giggled at it. Morvenge (a scaredy-cat with charitable tendencies) was afraid that his daddy would appear, perhaps fall down from the ceiling or crawl out of the wall, and have them both drawn and quartered. One of the dwarfs shrieked with laughter and covered his mouth with his hat.

“Wanda, do you know where we are?” asked Moiris.

Wanda slapped herself on the forehead to make it clear to him what a stupid question it was. The penny dropped and Moiris blushed a little. “Yeah, if you don’t even get lost at the North Pole, then you probably know.”

“Hey,” said Baby Yaga, “do those stray thingamajigs come into being by themselves, or do you make them?”

“The ones in the woods were made by other will-o’-the-wisps long ago and the ones in town are made by me. I can also make a stray chair or a forgetting mattress.”

“Show us! Show us!” begged the dwarfs.

“Yes, please, show us!” joined in Moiris.

“Go to hell, you know-it-all!” said Wanda, pulling a face. Then she changed her mind: “All right then. But everybody has to close their eyes. It’s my trade secret and I don’t want anybody watching me at work.”

“It won’t do any good with me,” said Baby Yaga. “We witches can see even with our eyes closed. But I’ll look up at the ceiling.”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Daniela Krolupperová & Barbora Kyšková

A Crime in Prague’s Old Town
Zločin na Starém Městě pražském

(Albatros, 144 pages)

Age: 10+

Historical crime stories for curious children appear rarely on bookshop shelves, but this one may also serve as an attractive book about Prague. The plot, set in old Prague, draws inspiration from Jakub Schikaneder’s well-known painting Murder in the House, skilfully rendered in Barbora Kyšková’s illustrations. Little Jakub witnesses a girl’s tragic fall from a balcony, returns home disturbed, and never forgets the dreadful scene. Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Zastávka questions many witnesses – a showcase of socialites of late 19th century Prague, by then a somewhat sidetracked metropolis. Daniela Krolupperová smoothly incorporates real people and events into her text, making sure that school-age readers of this Golden Ribbon-winning text will learn not only who the perpetrator of the crime was, but also how the sports organisation Sokol and the first grammar school for girls Minerva came to exist.

Praise

“A Crime in Prague’s Old Town is both readable and informative”

— Jitka Zítková, iLiteratura

Awards

• 2015 Golden Ribbon Award – Literary section: Literature for youth

Links

Publisher: www.albatrosmedia.cz

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

The Man that No-one Saw

As dusk was falling over Prague, a shadow flickered in the dark streets of the Jewish quarter. A tall, thin man in a long coat hurried along, deftly avoiding passers-by. He skirted round two old women with covered heads and a tired stove fitter. He dashed past a hunchbacked rag-and-bone man who was sitting in front of a shop on a stool with one leg shorter than the others. He nimbly jumped over a hen which was happily pecking at some sewage spilled over the cold cobblestones. He dodged wheelbarrows filled with vegetables and a staggering drunk in a paint-spattered overall.

He ran through the narrow streets with their dark, musty houses. His echoing steps boomed as though they were harbingers of evil. He kept his face lowered so that it was impossible to see his eyes. However, if someone had looked into them, they would have seen a silently screaming terror within them. He was nervously clutching something in his clammy right hand.

He ran out of Rabín Street and along Hampejská. He stopped for a few seconds outside the pub U Denice, as though debating whether or not to enter. Or perhaps he only needed to catch his breath. He continued on at almost full pelt. At one critical moment the object he was tightly grasping glinted in the twilight. From the rich lustre it was clear that it was a bar of gold.

No-one had any inkling that he had left the house at number 255 Rabín Street that afternoon. And no-one was ever supposed to find out, because death had entered the house that day, and he was the one who had invited it in.

Mother was just clearing the table. Karel disappeared outside again; his friends were whistling for him from below the window. Kuba remained seated. He took out a piece of paper. There was still some space in the bottom right corner. He already knew what he would draw. He had been thinking about it all the time he had been eating. A horse. The kind that Váchal the carter had. A skewbald. Pawing the ground with his front leg.

Kuba was two years younger than Karel and completely different in character. He didn’t like to fight. He was too small in build and could be easily knocked about, although if it came down to it, little Kuba would slug it out stubbornly till his last breath. He never gave up.

Mother tidied up the kitchen. A quiet atmosphere of contentment filled the house. Father was at work and Karel was outside. Kuba tried to imagine the precise appearance of the horse’s leg, but he couldn’t do it. Lost in thought, he chewed away at his pencil. How come I don’t know when I see the horse every day? he said to himself rather crossly.

The leg he had sketched stood out unnaturally from the horse’s body. The drawing was going badly. Kuba frowned. Mother came up to him and leaned over the picture. She smiled and patted the boy on the head. He would completely fill each piece of paper with his drawings. She knew that his constant urge to draw was due to his talent – a talent which he most likely got from her late brother Toník. She never skimped on buying paper for little Kuba, even though it was expensive.

“You should probably bend the leg downwards, like this,” she advised her son, showing him with her finger the direction of the stroke. “But otherwise the horse looks very real.”

But Kuba just frowned even more. It made him angry when he wasn’t able to draw what he wanted. He pushed the chair sharply away from the table so that it scraped noisily along the wooden floor. He jumped up and had a good mind to scrunch up the paper and throw it away. However, the paper cost a lot of money and there was still some space on it.

“It’s all wrong!” he shouted.

“That doesn’t matter. The next one will turn out better!” Mother had a kind and gentle voice.

“I ruined the whole thing” said Kuba furiously.

Mother put the plates into the dresser and came back over to Kuba. She patted him on the head again.

“You have to be patient,” she said pleasantly.

But Kuba just frowned and said nothing. He wasn’t at all patient, and more than anything he couldn’t stand it when his drawings were going badly. He got very annoyed with himself.

“I’m going to run over to the carter’s to have a look,” he finally announced to his mother, because despite his best efforts he couldn’t recreate a living horse in his imagination.

“OK,” agreed Mother, “But don’t be long!” She handed Kuba his short jacket and his cap. “And be careful,” she added, as always.

Kuba rushed out of the door to his house on the corner of Dlouhá and Hradební Street. The Schikaneders were Catholics. Kuba had been christened by the priest in St Jakub’s church, which was very near the house where the family lived. It wasn’t at all unpleasant to live at the edge of the Jewish quarter in the Old Town. There the Catholic and Jewish worlds encountered each other in a peaceful, kind and conciliatory atmosphere. The neighbours knew each other and got along together without any problems. Everyone had their place here.

Kuba ran to the carter’s, but when he got there he discovered that Mr Váchal was away with his cart.

Fury smouldered within Kuba. How is it I can’t remember exactly what a horse’s leg looks like? he raged inwardly. He knew that he wouldn’t find peace until he had drawn the horse properly. And now he was to leave empty-handed? No way!

He carried on into the Jewish quarter. But, of course, they’ve got horses here too! In autumn Katz the coalman hired a whole team of them for delivering coal. Kuba was pleased that he had remembered this and quickened his pace.

He ran along Hampejská Street and down into Rabín to the courtyard of house number 255. However, there were no horses to be seen, although there was a large red admiral butterfly on the wall beside the gate. This was odd as it was autumn and butterflies no longer flew around the city. But before Kuba could get a better look at the multicoloured butterfly, something plummeted onto the stone cobbles beside him. There was the sound of a dull thud. It was all over in an instant.

Right in front of Kuba on the cobbles beside the gutter lay the body of a pretty young woman. Her arms stretched out limply. Bright red blood had begun to flow around her head. There was no doubting that she was dead. She must have fallen from the courtyard gallery.

Kuba froze. He was paralyzed with fear. He stared breathlessly at the girl’s gentle face stained with blood and at her thick hair, which had come undone from its ponytail and now spread around the girl’s head like a mysterious halo. It was quickly becoming matted with blood.

Then someone knocked into Kuba so forcefully that he fell to the ground. It was only when his head struck the cold cobblestones that he became aware of people in the courtyard. Until now no-one had spoken, but all of a sudden there was motion everywhere. Footsteps clattered on the cobbles.

“Muuurder!” screamed a woman.

And then another squeaky, equally high-pitched voice: “Muuurder! Heeeeelp!”

“Anežka!” roared a man’s deep voice.

“Police! Call the police!” added another woman.

“My dearest Anežka!” came the muffled voice of a younger woman, breaking into a desperate cry.

Voices shouted out at the same time, merging into one confused din.

Kuba got up. His head hurt from his fall and for a very brief moment he couldn’t see anything. When he regained his sight, he tottered out of the courtyard. In the growing confusion no-one noticed him. He hadn’t even made it to the next house when he started to be sick.

This gave him some relief, so he was able to continue on his way. He would have liked to run, but it was impossible. His body felt weary and strangely numb. He didn’t notice the piercing whistles of the policemen. He left 255 Rabín Street without even realizing that there was blood coming from his knee, his right forearm and his temple. He didn’t notice how much it hurt until he bumped into a tottering figure.

“What are you doing, getting in my way?!” shouted the man in the overcoat sternly. He abruptly raised his hand, which was holding a book.

Kuba didn’t answer.

“You almost made me drop this artistic gem!” he thundered. “This is Jules Verne!” he said, lecturing Kuba, and thrust the large novel in front of his face. “A great artist of the new age! Cinq semaines en ballon, you rapscallion!”

The man fell silent for a moment and frowned. Then he shook his head as though he were quarrelling with someone and waved his arm in a bitter gesture: “But no-one here knows anything about him! Of course not!”

Kuba stared breathlessly at him.

“No-one here appreciates real art. Prague is a European outpost, the less said about it the better,” said the man, continuing his lamentation. Then he looked at the boy, who was scared to death, and realized that the child couldn’t understand what he was saying. “Be off with you then, boy!” he finally shouted.

He turned round and continued walking to the Unionka Café to persuade the publisher Vilímek to bring out his book in Czech. He was fairly certain that he would have no luck. In fact, Neruda had got used to being shown the door…

Kuba shot off home. Suddenly he was able to run again.

Just as Mother was beginning to wonder whether to go and look for her son, Kuba finally returned. Terrified and exhausted, he embraced his mother tightly at the doorway. His trouser legs were torn and the blood had started to dry on his knees. His forehead was scraped, the right temple covered in blood, and he also had dried spots of blood on his arm.

“Good Lord, what happened to you?! Who were you fighting with?” asked Mother in alarm. She carried Kuba into the kitchen – even though he was already big and heavy.

“I wasn’t in a fight. Somebody bumped into me,” explained Kuba, confused. “I fell and hurt myself. I can’t remember. A strange man threatened me with a book.”

Mother didn’t waste time and immediately began to heat some water on the stove so that she could wash Kuba properly and clean out his wounds. That was important, even if it did hurt like the devil.

Kuba cried. He had a fever and was asleep before Mother had carried him to bed.

Even after a few days, when the fever had passed, Kuba was still unable to recall what had happened that day. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. But despite that, he never forgot.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Ivan Wernisch & Jiří Stach

Plop! The Lebott’s Korc Unscrooed, He Upguzzeled Liqueur
Plop! Vyvrtil Žlahvout pšunt i chlpal liquére

(Meander, 56 pages)

Age: 12+

Works by Czech State Award for Literature laureate Ivan Wernisch, who entered the field of literature half a century ago along with his peers Petr Kabeš, Antonín Brousek or Pavel Šrut, have two characteristic modes. While the first is tinged with existential sadness, the joyful sources of inspiration of the second one spring from 20th century more and less avant-garde movements. The latter is also typical of Plop!’s “fine verse and prose”, in which the author parodies people who are close to him as well as the general ignoble circumstances, but most importantly of all re-imbues contemporary Czech poetry with original humour full of smirk, slyness and linguistic combinatorics embodied into neologisms. We can reasonably suspect that the poet’s mystifying playfulness, akin to Christian Morgenstern’s grotesque texts, in combination with Jiří Stach’s pictorial “embellishment”, will prove especially charming for adolescent readers seeking to transgress the boundaries of language in search of an unrestrained form of expression.

Praise

“Jonathan Swift … Lewis Carroll … Václav Havel … As you can see, the roots which feed Wernisch’s Plop are very deep and widespread.”

— Michal Žák, BrnoŽurnál

“The book is intended for clever children and adults who never stopped being children.”

— Petr Šmíd, A2

Links

Publisher: www.meander.cz

Illustrations

Dozens of excellent books were published in the Czech Republic in 2015, all of which undoubtedly deserve to be translated and read abroad. In the next three monthly features we will present those we consider to be the most important books of the year, books which have been popular with readers and critics in the Czech Republic and which we believe will also appeal to international audiences. We begin this month with literary fiction, followed by books for children and young adults in March and genre fiction in April.

Contents

Petra Soukupová: Under the Snow

Anna Bolavá: Into Darkness

Chaim Cigan: Little Mr Talisman

David Zábranský: Martin Juhás or Czechoslovakia

Markéta Baňková: Triviality; A Romance in the Age of Genetics

Iva Pekárková: Roast Zebra

Roman Ráž: Spa Hopes

Ludvík Němec: Indulgences for the Next Night

Matěj Hořava: Distilled Spirit. Stories from the Banat

Petra Soukupová

Under the Snow
Pod sněhem

(Host, 373 pages)

Petra Soukupová is one of the most successful young Czech authors, consistently popular with readers and critics alike. Under the Snow, is caustic, ironic and highly readable prose about those universal themes — family and relationships. Soukupová is succinct and considers her words carefully. Her latest novel begins with a seemingly ordinary situation: one winter day three sisters get into a car and head for their parents’ place, where they will celebrate their father’s birthday. Daughters, a baby, a dog, an iPad and a hangover. Only a few miles into the drive the atmosphere grows tense and at this stage the sisters are unaware that more unpleasantness awaits them at their parents’ home…

Soukupová’s previous books have been published in Italian, Polish, Slovene, Bulgarian, Croatian and Bosnian and a Polish translation of Under the Snow is already in preparation. Although Under the Snow was published less than a year ago, it has already sold 15,000 copies and is expected to be nominated for the Magnesia Litera and Czech Book awards.

Praise

“By combining spoken words and thoughts and by switching characters — each of the sisters is a narrator — the author turns an ordinary story into a thrilling read. Every conflict — arguments about who sits where, a stop at a petrol station, changing a tyre — is seen from multiple perspectives.”

— Magdalena Čechlovská, iHned

Links

Author website: www.petra-soukupova.cz
Foreign rights: www.dbagency.cz
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

An excerpt can be found here.
 

Anna Bolavá

Into Darkness
Do tmy

(Odeon, 232 pages)

What Anna Bolavá achieved with this book happens very rarely: Into Darkness is her prose debut, yet everyone agrees that it has none of the common shortcomings of first novels. Bolavá uses a proven mainstream technique: take a loner, an outsider with an unusual hobby (collecting herbs in this case), and skilfully transform this innocent pastime into a functional and profound existential metaphor. From the beginning, this story of a lonely, ill woman who has dedicated most of her life to collecting, drying and providing medicinal plants, has apocalyptic undertones. Despite the slow, seemingly dispassionate pace, a strange unease bubbles under the surface. The translation rights have already been sold to the Polish publisher Książkowe Klimaty and the book is sure to receive nominations for the most prestigious Czech literary prizes.

Praise

“Into Darkness is remarkably magical and powerful prose.”

— Petr A. Bílek, Respekt

“Anna Bolavá has managed to construct a dramatic tale on the foundations of one person’s story, the symbolism and straightforwardness of its plot resembles a modern myth.”

— Petr Nagy, iLiteratura

Links

Publisher: www.odeon-knihy.cz

Excerpt ▼

I take a deep breath and plunge into the tangle of trees. Each branch of the walnut tree is already slightly scarred. Either by me or by a cat. The beasts are everywhere that I can’t reach. They leap from branch to branch, emitting strange, shrill sounds. Sometimes they snarl somewhere very close by, but as soon as I turn around they’re gone. I rarely see them, so it’s impossible to count them. Here amid the branches they play a strange game which I don’t understand and which doesn’t seem to be a kind of amorous cat chase. It is more likely they’re all preparing to do battle. Perhaps they are chasing me, but I’m not going to worry about that. There’s only one thing I’m concerned about right now: filling my basket, maintaining my balance, not getting scratched and getting back down. And apparently I’m supposed to look after the cats! They never take their eyes off me, and it seems more like Marcela gave them orders to look after me. The black ones are the worst. You can’t see them and they definitely attack from behind. The white ones appear to be nice, they are fat, not so agile, and they hardly ever make a sound. But then they have those blood-red eyes. I can never look into them. They hypnotise me and could cause more damage than you’d expect. I won’t look at them, I’ll mind my own business. I climb down with a full basket and take the second one. All the time the feline creatures wail their insane songs until my head begins to spin. This is a conspiracy. Their cries pierce my head , issuing a challenge to the drug-subdued pain there. They want to gang up with it. And the pain goes along with it. It rises to the surface and spreads far and wide like an enormous exotic flower. One of those which you can’t pick. Because they offer no practical use, only destruction. However, I’m determined that I’ll fill the second basket, come what may. And I’ll even have enough strength to empty it out in the loft, I have a vent there which I leave half-open so it lets in fresh air. I can do it. After all, this is me.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Chaim Cigan

Little Mr Talisman
Malý pan Talisman

(Torst, 160 pages)

Today we know that Chaim Cigan is the pseudonym of author and rabbi Karol Sidon. However when Altschulova metoda (Altschul’s Method), the first book to be published under this ambiguous name, came out in 2014, the search for his true identity became a major topic in the Czech literary world. While the aforementioned Altschul’s Method is part of an extensive tetralogy, our choice for this selection has a much more modest length. At the same time it retains all the features which make Cigan one of the most compelling contemporary Czech authors: fairytales for adults, neo-mythical stories, the supernatural, pop culture… Little Mr Talisman, with the help of a magic prayer shawl and prayer straps, is able to fly and help people who are unable to help themselves. You will find out a good deal about the Jewish faith, Jewish customs and Jewish mysticism and be reminded that things can often appear to be quite different from how they actually are, that good deeds do not always have to turn out well, and that it is better to look at everything from several perspectives.

Praise

“Unlike pre-war Jewish folklore, preserved thanks to many excellent writers, Little Mr Talisman is undeniably contemporary.”

— Marek Toman, MF Dnes

“Jews also have their superhero who helps them in times of need. And it’s not golem. It’s Mr Talisman. (…) The informal approach and understanding of minor everyday troubles, whose nature is generally tragicomical, resembles Karel Čapek’s storybooks.”

— Pavel Mandys, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Author website: www.karolsidon.com
Publisher: www.torst.cz

Excerpt ▼

In the English city of Birmingham there lived a tailor by the name of Mr Talisman. He had a tailor’s workshop on the first floor of a grand building that belonged to him – right on the main street, if you please, though not in the centre – and a shop on the ground floor. If someone had their clothes made at Mr Talisman’s, it meant that they were a better class of people.

The Talismans had one son, Augustin, but only in a uniform in a framed photograph, because many years before he had been eaten by a leopard in Africa. That was perhaps the reason why Mr Talisman loved children so much, although Mrs Talisman could not stand the sight of them for the same reason. She looked after the shop and practically never went into the workshop, and if it was necessary to measure any girls over twelve years old for a dress, one of the seamstresses would do it.

When clothes were being made for children, the whole family would set off to the tailor’s. It looked like a trip to the doctor’s or to the photographer’s. However, this trip was a much more pleasant one. Although the children had to stand up straight as if they were at the photographer’s and not fidget when Mr Talisman was measuring them or trying new clothes on them, he then gave them some chewing gum as a reward. He was also referred to as little Mr Talisman because he was small in size, like a large baby.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

David Zábranský

Martin Juhás or Czechoslovakia
Martin Juhás čili Československo

(Premedia, 570 pages)

Have you ever read a story about a boy who would from time to time take trips into the wide world while still inside his mother’s womb? And what if these trips influenced world events? Zábranský has written a book which provoked a lot of discussion last year and has received many enthusiastic reviews. This lengthy novel skilfully combines many types of storytelling: reviews have compared it to Rabelais and Sterne but also Márquez and Latin American magic realism. The setting is however in southern Bohemia instead of Márquez’s Macondo. The founding of Czechoslovakia, the Great Depression, collapse of Czechoslovakia, World War II, expulsion of Germans, another Czechoslovakia, we watch all this from the perspective of small-town heroes. However, the local settings and events only serve as a backdrop for universally understandable humour. “You aren’t reading a report about the past. You are watching a narrator-illusionist, who is trying to assemble a suggestive whole from individual characters, places and events […] without feeling the need to address the fact that certain elements are from the real world, others are derived from myths and some are pure phantasmagoria,” writes Petr A. Bílek in his review for the Respekt magazine. Zábranský already has one Magnesia Litera award and we can expect at least a nomination for Martin Juhás.

Praise

“Zábranský’s new, weighty and playful novel stands out as an exceptional and remarkable work — even when we consider it in the context of the last twenty years of Czech literature. […] The novel is a lavish feast of different types of storytelling. Reminiscent of Rabelais, Sterne, Vančura but also Márquez and the whole of Latin American magic realism.”

— Petr A. Bílek, Respekt

“Martin Juhás or Czechoslovakia is a great novel. I’m not afraid to say that it will become a significant milestone in the development of historical literature.”

— Marek Dobrý, Lógr magazín

Links

Email: zabranskydavid@gmail.com
Publisher: premedia.sk

Excerpt ▼

Just a few days after meeting the love of his life, Reitmajer the architect met with great misfortune: one summer’s evening in the year of our Lord 1921, while lying on the grass beside the Štěkeň weir, he was kicked right in the balls. Those responsible for this act were a group of flirtatious, pot-bellied little communists covered in blood, vomit and ice cream, envious examples of “le petit communiste”. It was “coitus interruptus radicalis”. (Coitus interruptus was Judita’s condition sine qua non if she were to sleep with Reitmajer at all; the condition of sine qua non copulare, we might perhaps say, so that if the interruption could come about in a different, less painful way… And so on). First of all the communists kicked the architect in the head and then between the legs.

At the hospital in Strakonice, which Reitmajer and Judita got to on the back of a brewery truck that was returning from delivering beer to the surrounding villages, the doctors examined Reitmajer and told him that he would never be able to have children. But as for erectile function, that should remain the same.

Although Judita never once visited Reitmajer in hospital, the architect’s interest was undiminished, and no sooner had the doctors allowed him to go home than he was trying to win over Judita again. He posted a crazy note in her letter box in Baar Street telling her, without a hint of self-esteem, about his new indisposition or rather disposition. “Indisposition or disposition? It depends how you look at it!” were Reitmajer’s exact words. “It would definitely be an advantage for you. I’ll never be able to, or have to, depending on how you look at it, have children, Judita!”

What was Judita supposed to say to that? “That guy’s crazy, Muffi,” explained the beautiful woman to her dog, promptly throwing Reitmajer’s note in the bin.

One morning in November, Reitmajer finally ventured through the gate into Judita’s garden. Judita quickly opened the window and shouted into the garden: “Lunatic! Lunatic! Impotent! Impotent!”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Markéta Baňková

Triviality; A Romance in the Age of Genetics
Maličkost; Romance z času genetiky

(Argo, 256 pages)

Markéta Baňková is a cosmopolitan, cultivated author who is also an audiovisual artist and graduate of graphic design and new media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Straka v říši entropie (The Magpie in the Realm of Entropy), her debut collection of fables, won a Magnesia Litera award, was nominated for the Josef Škvorecký Award and has been translated into Polish. In Triviality, Baňková again combines prose with scientific themes which shape and illustrate the story. This time her topic is biology. Hidden under the mask of black humour is an examination of human identity, a puzzle which is especially pertinent with new discoveries in genetics and the associated question of free will. Are we slaves to our genetic makeup? Are our thoughts influenced by parasites? Or does the society we grow up in have the greatest influence? The main character, Tomáš, a genetics student raised by adoptive parents, is searching for his own roots. Science forms his worldview, but this lens can distort his personal, especially romantic, relationships…

Praise

Picked as one of the best books to buy for Christmas by the editors and reviewers of the Respekt magazine.

Links

Author website: www.bankova.cz
Publisher: www.argo.cz

Excerpt ▼

NOW

When I was about ten, they began to leave me alone in the evenings. They would kiss me goodnight and go off to visit somebody. I would lie in bed, looking into the darkness. The shelves with the boxes, the suitcase on top of the wardrobe and the dressing gown on its hook seemed bigger in the dim light. Quietly expectant. But I wasn’t afraid. I waited until the garden gate clicked shut and the voices from the street grew faint. The barking from the neighbours’ gardens accompanying my parents’ steps died down. I sat up. I listened to the ticking alarm clock and the roar of blood in my head and I felt the seconds passing until the time when my parents would return home.

I was looking forward to it, and yet at the same time I wanted to hold onto this moment. Not that it was more important than other ones. But I had it all to myself. And so I tried to engrave it into my memory in as much detail as possible. Today – though slightly blurred – it is still there: a child’s bed in a dark room, a car occasionally passing by the window and projecting moving strips of light onto the wardrobe. They would appear, expand, freeze for a moment, abruptly slide at an angle onto the walls, and the room would once more be plunged into darkness. Outside a solitary bark could be heard, soon joined by others from the southern part of the village, and then barking began to sound from the east, the north…all the dogs loudly demarcating the borders of their village territory at once. And I made up my mind: “I must remember this moment all my life.”

Time. I think about it, but not like other people who only complain about the lack of it. It fascinates me. I move my fingers through the gloom, as if it were possible to catch hold of the present disappearing into the past. Even now I still try to do it through my memory or I use a camera to help me. But no matter how hard I try, the next second NOW is gone.

Mind you, I could happily have done without the NOW of this Saturday morning. The floor was swaying and in the half-blind mirror of the chipped bathroom cabinet I saw a familiar, somewhat weary face. I shuffled back from the bathroom to the bedroom. In the next bed a pair of socks were sticking out from the duvet; I used to enjoy making fun of the holes in them, which revealed the toes, but now I was keenly aware of their festering odour. The three bare toes of Stinker, a maths/phys student, protruded from the holes like a monument to our grubby coexistence.

Three years in a shared room in a hall of residence. It was just as well he was away a lot. Resigned, I breathed in. I’d already given up on speeches calling for hygiene to be maintained. The female visitors who we never ceased to hope would come round might have thought he was no longer alive and had begun to decompose, especially as he spent so much time lying around in bed. No, don’t think about how much worse he would smell if…

I lay down. A waterfall of images tumbled beneath my closed eyelids:

A girl’s pale neck in the flickering light of street lamps. A heavily made-up Frog describing the details of a love triangle. The clumsy movements of a drunken Martin. The plait of a girl’s legs on a seat.

The deep rumble of the bar.

“So tell me about the party!” Stinker sat up in bed and put on his glasses. “Dish the dirt!”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Iva Pekárková

Roast Zebra
Pečená zebra

(Mladá fronta, 272 pages)

Pekárková studied microbiology in the Czech Republic but emigrated in 1983 shortly before she graduated. She travelled to the United States, where she had a number of jobs, including bartending, social work and taxi driving in New York City. In 1997 she returned to Prague, but then left again in 2005, this time to London. “Her move into exile gave rise to the major themes in the author’s work: the position and perspective of a foreigner, a person’s ‘multiple’ identities after leaving home, and the fundamental need to understand ‘the other’ (person, town, country, culture, events),” was how academic Vladimír Novotný characterized Pekárková’s work which has been translated into English and German.

Czech literature has very few voices covering multicultural topics based on extensive experience. What we value most in Roast Zebra is its insight and skilful writing; Pekárková wants to communicate a message. Her prose is succinct, witty, impartial, she writes with a light hand. In this novel she writes about a modern-day phenomenon no-one has yet written about, that is, ‘black-and-white’ relationships within the Czech Republic. She knows what’s going on in Prague streets and nightclubs as well as in sleepy Czech towns whose inhabitants may never have seen a ‘live’ black man. All of her protagonists are based on real-life characters with one thing in common: their partners of choice are black. In dashes of black and white, as well as many other colours, Iva Pekárková describes their destinies with both depth and humour.

Praise

“It’s as if Pekárková wrote with her body, her own senses, instinctively. Her writing is full-blooded, mighty.”

— Radim Kopáč, iDnes

Links

Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: www.mf.cz

Excerpt ▼

Veronika’s first child was always laughing. She would push the pram around the streets, through the park, awkwardly manoeuvre it onto the tram (she always hoped that there wouldn’t be some well-meaning, clumsy type waiting at the stop, who would grab hold of the pram, almost tipping the child out, and insist on “helping her to get on”, continuing to do so until the tram left with an irritated ring of the bell) — and a loud baritone laugh could be heard from the pram. Veronika’s first child was like one of those toys that roar with laughter when you press a button. Strangers — passers-by in the street, old grannies in the park, passengers on the tram — would turn towards the sound, and after a moment’s hesitation the penny would drop and they would smile at both of them, and some of them would even burst into hearty laughter like Veronika’s child. That was all it took for somebody to give the two of them a dirty look. (That is, assuming they hadn’t seen Veronika’s child.)

Veronika’s child laughed when she brought him to her breast and almost choked with laughter in a torrent of milky bubbles when she burped him on her shoulder and then put him down in his cradle, that is the wicker dog basket with the pawprint design on the upholstery, because it was cheaper than a cradle and since she was young Veronika had always been accustomed to buying what was cheaper.

Veronika’s child laughed when he lifted his head in the cradle, and laughed when he was learning to take his first steps and all of a sudden sat down on his bottom. Veronika couldn’t help herself: she laughed along with him. She laughed when he threw up on her shoulder after he’d been fed, she laughed when she turned him over in the cradle with the pawprint pattern, and later she laughed when she picked him up out of the dust and blew on his knees. Veronika laughed her way through Ikenna’s early childhood. It was wonderful, just wonderful.

But other things weren’t so wonderful.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Roman Ráž

Spa Hopes
Lázeňské naděje

(Akropolis, 432 pages)

Roman Ráž is an author from the older generation of Czech writers (b. 1935), who has experience not only as a prose author but also as a radio, television and film scriptwriter. His books have been published in Polish, German and Romanian. Spa Hopes is the second part of a planned trilogy of novels which follows the fates of one family in Slaňany, a Moravian spa town, over the course of the 20th century. Ráž explores the strained relationship between the Czechs and the Germans, while steering clear of painting a black and white picture. He allows a Sudeten German woman to report the horrors of displacement and he does not hide the love between his Moravian cousin and a young man from the Hitler Youth. Ráž portrays the epoch free from any partiality, with a proven mixture of memories, newspaper reports, letters and diary entries. The first volume of the trilogy, Lázeňské dobrodružství (Spa Adventures), in which Ráž focused on World War I and the following three years of battles between the left and the right over the new Czechoslovak state was nominated for the Josef Škvorecký prize.

Praise

“[Ráž] refutes the comfortable division into killers and victims, as well as rejecting collective guilt. Take, for example, Hitlerjugend member Rolf, who moves into a small hotel in Slaňany towards the end of the war: he lost his entire family because of Hitler and his gentlemanly behaviour is clearly influenced more by his spontaneous love for the granddaughter of Maria Klánská than his mandatory loyalty towards the Führer. When he takes off his uniform to go swimming, it’s suddenly not at all clear what side he’s on.”

— Radim Kopáč, UNI

Links

Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: akropolis.info

Excerpt ▼

Come evening, the front pages of all the newspapers will be describing the triumphant journey of Carol II through the streets of Prague and no one will notice that I’ll miss my train because of this spectacle.

I frantically consider my options.

I won’t return to Kateřina. It would only cause confusion. One should not say farewell twice. I’ll find out when the next train leaves and go to Fanta’s Cafe. I’ll spend hours there, but what does that matter?

I should also send a telegram to Tomík about my late arrival. Maybe they will deliver it to him, maybe not, they probably won’t catch him at home. Who knows where he will be when he finishes work in the shop? I don’t suppose he returns home when I’m away, let alone stays there with his model aircraft or to play the piano. He’s sure to be making full use of my absence and enjoying his leisure as he pleases.

But what does please him? What can he be doing?

I’ve had similar questions a couple of times now. Was it out of fear for his safety? No, there is certainly no danger for him in Slaňany. What does he actually do in his free time? He can’t be visiting the Balcar’s that often!

“They say he’s the last European gentleman,” the chauffeur smirks.

He interrupts my thoughts.

“Who?”

“The Romanian king! Or was it his son? I read the other day that he has transformed Bucharest into the Paris of the east. He made some sort of boulevards there. They’d be handy here right now. Prague is still a provincial town. Vienna on the other hand…!”

I stop listening. I know what Vienna is. But I don’t know what Tomík is doing in Slaňany.

Then the car finally starts moving. We are approaching the National Museum. The pavements are even more packed, crowds of people line the streets, the open windows of houses are full of faces. We move closer.

“Come, madame, we can’t continue, we’ll have to wait until he passes.”

The chauffeur is already outside and opening the car door for me.

At first I get out slowly, then I move faster, the excitement has got to me too, I’m deafened by screams, shouting, cheers, I stand on my tiptoes to see over the tangle of waving people and I see him!

Dressed all in white, he looks amazing, medals and decorations glitter on his chest, it feels like I’m watching a famous actor, he crosses the square, greets us from his open car with a raised arm…

Simply a king!

Then his vehicle disappears and we hastily return to the taxi. The chauffeur starts the car, blows the horn, pushes slowly forward through the street, two policeman in white gloves stop pedestrians to allow him to pass, yes, taxis always have the right of way a taxi driver once explained to me, after all, their job is to get people to their destination on time.

Another policeman is literally hurrying us along, it looks like I may still catch my train…

“Well, that agreement of ours is small, but we should be grateful, even though Yugoslavia and Romania aren’t exactly great partners, destroying them would be as easy as einz zwei drei for Hitler and his Wehrmacht, but it’s better than nothing. Did you know that Carol is offering us a million soldiers?”

“What for?” I ask without paying much attention, I’m looking at the large clock on the Wilson Station tower, if I hurry, I’ll leave on time!

“For our defence, in case Hitler wants to include Czechoslovakia in that Lebensraum of his.”

“Oh, I see,” I say, “how much do I owe you?”

(Translated by Jack Coling)

Ludvík Němec

Indulgences for the Next Night
Odpustky pro příští noc

(Druhé město, 208 pages)

Ludvík Němec’s writing is characterised by its refined, polished style. The short stories in Indulgences for the Next Night are a serious and intimate look at men and women: When they meet, how many people really meet? How many beings are with us during our most private moments, are they always alive and are they necessarily human? The characters of Němec’s stories seek answers on the boundary between real and imagined worlds. They are looking for forgiveness, whether in the form of new love, new life, or at least an understanding of their current existence. “The short stories often revolve around relationships, sex and romantic betrayal. In the first, a dead lover returns at Christmas to help the ageing main character remember that the end of their relationship wasn’t as clear as he had believed for years. The unreliability of memory is a brilliant theme,” writes Klára Kolářová in the Právo newspaper. For his previous collection of short stories, Láska na cizím hrobě (Love on a Stranger’s Grave), Němec was nominated for a Magnesia Litera award. His latest collection has already been nominated for the Josef Škvorecký Award and we expect more nominations in 2016.

Praise

“Indulgences for the Next Night contains texts which combine the playfulness of postmodernism with a depth of meaning. ”

— Kryštof Špidla, Host

“[Indulgences for the Next Night] offers masterfully narrated stories full of ideas and storytelling inventiveness, reading it reminds us of times when writing was done ‘by hand’, slowly and carefully.”

— Petr A. Bílek, Respekt

Links

Publisher: druhemesto.cz

Excerpt ▼

“And what did the guy say?”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“He slapped her about a bit?”

“No. He turned bright red and then even wished me a merry Christmas.”

“Unbelievable.”

“It’s the anabolics these Rambos take. That crap makes them emotionally unbalanced, sometimes even impotent, some actually end up with a slightly changed sexual identity.“

“What a great topic for Christmas eve. What do you take?”

“You know. Cipralex.”

Which is a third generation antidepressant. Kamil has been using it for over a year now and really feels better. Feeling everything a lot less helps. He isn’t even gaining as much weight as he did with all those previous pills. Although he gave up on trying to reach his former weight — now almost one hundred and ten, before, just over ninety — a long time ago. That’s another advantage of these antidepressants. You painlessly give up on a lot of things. They should be pouring it into the water supply, he thinks. Soon they’ll have no other option anyway. That’s my worldview.

“You shouldn’t smoke weed with it, should you?”

“I found online that it’s only dangerous with ecstasy. And since when do I smoke? I wouldn’t even know how to buy it! That pinch of weed with the son is just a family ritual. Once a year at Christmas.”

“I think that’s even worse. You smoking together.”

“Besides, I was hoping the weed might help with the loss of libido antidepressants are meant to cause. What do you say? Can’t you give me… at least a chance? Once a year at Christmas?”

But Monika only shakes her head. A rather beautiful head, outside and in. And she smiles gently, really gently. As if she was smiling at a pet, thinks Kamil. As if she was smiling at a golden retriever?

“Just don’t force yourself, because then you’re even more depressing. Pehaps you should have arranged that kind of Christmas present with the girl in the car. She might have given you something for that dumpling.”

“Now that you mention it, she actually said that that’s her name. Darja — like dáreček, a present.”

“Well that was probably a sign. Like a Christmas star.”

“She wasn’t much of a star.”

“And you’re not much of a biblical king. If it was for medical reasons, maybe I wouldn’t even mind.”

Kamil, however, feels a sudden longing for the days when she used to be jealous. When she still cared for him. That’s why he says impulsively:

“Remember, once, how you threw food out of the window because you were jealous?”

“What are you talking about? How much have you smoked?”

But from his wife’s expression he can tell that she’s remembered. She’s become alert. Kamil too. Suddenly neither of them know how much venom this ancient snake still has — a story slithering through the high dry grass, which was once temperate pasture — in its fangs.

Sssss!

(Translated by Jack Coling)

Matěj Hořava

Distilled Spirit. Stories from the Banat
Pálenka. Prózy z Banátu

(Host, 124 pages)

Although Distilled Spirit came out at the end of 2014, the reactions to this debut collection of short stories mean it undoubtedly deserves a place in our selection. It is already certain that Distilled Spirit will be published in Poland (Książkowe Klimaty) and Bulgaria (ERGO) and more translations are sure to follow. Although the book’s subtitle, Stories from the Banat, is a clue to its themes, these stories are not an escape to exotic locations or nostalgia, they are a natural combination of the present with the past, the domestic and the foreign. Ondřej Horák captured this succinctly in his review for the Hospodářské noviny newspaper: “Matěj Hořava shows that Central Europe, to borrow an advertising slogan, can still be lived to the fullest.” The text transports us to the remote mountains above the Danube and into the small villages in the Romanian Banat where Czechs have lived for over two centuries. A young Czech teacher arrives in one of these villages to forget, but the everyday reality of rural life and his timid attempts to integrate into this closed community are gradually overshadowed by intrusive memories brought about by the isolation and loneliness: bitter years spent in a grammar school gym, the solitude of different shores and journeys, people’s faces, fleeting moments of closeness…

Praise

“[Hořava’s] prose debut is a true revelation. […] Matěj Hořava is a poet in prose who shows what literature can do without the need to be literary.”

— Ondřej Horák, Hospodářské noviny

“I venture to say that a debut like thirty-five-year-old Matěj Hořava’s Distilled Spirit hasn’t come along in Czech literature for many years. It is a wonderfully concise, finely honed work in which every word has its place like a piece in a dry stone wall, making it reminiscent of the prose of Čep, Durych and Vaculík. The rhythm created by the laying down of individual words, and also by complete ‘diary entries’, enters the bloodstream to addictive effect.”

— Petr A. Bílek, Respekt

Awards

• 2015 Czech Book Award
• 2015 Magnesia Litera – Discovery of the year

Links

Foreign rights: www.dbagency.cz
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

An excerpt can be found here.

Post-1989 changes

The November 1989 revolution was a turning point for all Czechoslovaks, with a profound effect on the form and reception of literature. Branches of Czech literature that had hitherto been separate (domestic, i.e. officially published, as well as émigré and samizdat literature) were now reunited. In the first euphoric months and years of the new freedom, the market was flooded with five-figure prose print-runs, which could not have previously been published as their authors were “prohibited” at home.

The nineties and the noughties were marked by the quest to find ways to finance culture and literature under the new conditions. As time passed, the state grant and subsidy support system stabilized, as did to some extent the private sponsorship system.

In addition to the material aspects of the new literary output, the problem that a common enemy had been lost proved very quickly to be of fundamental importance throughout the period in question. Under Communism, literature in general and prose works reflecting the state of society in particular were associated with the need for political engagement, either in the direct service of the regime or against it. Hence, for the majority of people in Czech society, good literature, like other types of art, was meant to replace the missing political dialogue and protest, and expected to express the civil dissatisfaction suppressed by the authorities.

Intoxicated by their newly won freedom, including the restored freedom of the press, people seemed to neglect the political and social side of literature for quite some time. Their altered social situation and lifestyle, the unprecedented opportunities opening up for self-realization, as well as writers’ hesitation over which subjects might be of interest and worthwhile, resulted in a mass exodus of readers. Within several years literature came to be an affair that only concerned a narrow community of experts and enthusiasts.

The writers’ loss of their previous privileged position, supposedly as the “conscience of the nation”, as the importance of literature was backstaged, was not a particular concern of the majority population, whereas the writers themselves felt this very strongly and tried to hark back to their former social prestige. In this they were meant to be assisted by a professional organization: Obec spisovatelů – the Association of Writers, established 3rd November 1989, which enjoyed considerable prestige from the outset, but which disintegrated, particularly after 2000 (as a reaction to the dismal state of this organization, Asociace spisovatelů was established in 2014, primarily for the younger generation of authors).

New opportunities for prose

In the first few years after 1989 a number of names of well-known and quite new authorial styles and poetics appeared on the prose scene. A large amount of respected output comprised works that had been written earlier, but that only now could be freely brought out by publishers at home. A prominent position was held from the outset by the 1960s generation of authors, with such celebrated authors as Josef Škvorecký, Milan Kundera, Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík and others, who were carrying on from their previous poetics, but at the same time trying to adapt to the new times and conditions.

Ludvík Vaculík and Ivan Klíma at Josef Zeman’s in Bezejovice. Photograph © Josef Zeman

The initial chaos gradually subsided, as people came to grips with the past and reassessed their values. Over the next few years a more stable quality and genre stratification of prose output gradually emerged, as names that acted as tried and tested “literary brands” emerged from the endless masses of writers. Literary prose subsequently spread over a broad, relatively stable range, bounded on either side by two fields: on the one hand challenging, elite works utilizing experimental, self-reflecting and essayistic elements, while on the other hand literature on the fringes of popular entertainment published in relatively high print-runs in line with the principles of commercial dumping. Between these two fields there was an unclearly defined sphere of prose that later in the new millennium was termed the “literary mainstream”.

Authentic prose

One of the most prominent streams of new post-1989 work was the programme of authentic literature, based on confidence in authors who tried to describe their own lives as truthfully as possible, without any redundant literary embellishment, games or illusions, in an entirely subjective and open manner, often with a sharp social-critical sting. This type of literature was most frequently published by authors who had personally suffered Communist oppression and who wished to publish their own powerful personal testimony.

The most productive genres in this stream of post-1989 literature were diaries and memoirs. This boom was based on the fact that the market was now swamped by texts which had not previously been publishable, and which had originally been intended by their authors to be purely personal matters, i.e. satisfying the need to record life passing by in the oppressive grip of the Communist regime along with a need of sorts to pass on a personal testimony and an urgent moral message to future generations. The key works here included Paměti 1–3, Memoirs 1-3, 1992, 1994, by Václav Černý, Jan Zábrana’s diary entries in Celý život 1, 2, My Whole Life, 1992, Teorie spolehlivosti, Reliability Theory, 1994, by Ivan Diviš and other authors such as Jan Hanč, Josef Hiršal, Bohumila Grögerová and Sergej Machonin. The present day was also presented in a distinctive and personal manner by a postwar Czech literary “classic”, Bohumil Hrabal, in works reflecting his personal experience of the November revolution and the early 1990s (Listopadový uragán, November Hurricane, 1990; Dopisy Dubence, Letters to Dubenka, 1994).

Jan Zábrana ‘Celý život’ (My Whole Life)

After the mid-1990s this publication spree subsided and they subsequently just appeared to a normal extent as just one strand in the broad literary spectrum, their role having been taken over by the memoir-novel genre, i.e. a genre of reminiscences on the interface between fiction and non-fiction. One exceptional late discovery of a private diary, whose publication was quite an event in the context of the times, was that of Deník 1959–1974 (Diary 1959-1974, 2003) by director Pavel Juráček.

Postmodern inspiration

Another of the most significant streams of post-1989 output was prose work under the influence of postmodern playfulness, boisterousness and laxity.

One author who had already produced highly postmodern works in exile was Jan Křesadlo (for example, during the 1990s his novel Obětina came out at home, 1994). During the 1990s the mantle of “postmodern classic” was taken over by Jiří Kratochvil, who actually advocated a postmodern programme (Medvědí román, Bear Novel, 1991; Má lásko, postmoderno, Postmodernity, My Love, 1994, and many other works). His prose works made use of uncanny and supernatural elements contrasting with entirely realist descriptions, bizarre motifs and untraditional narrative methods placed in a “Magic Brno” setting. He was one of the few to carry on work of this kind in the new millennium, inspired by the literary trend at that time to reflect life in its most traumatic forms under the Communist regime in combination with the distinctive poetics of his work (e.g. Lehni, bestie, Lie Down, Beast, 2002).

The prose work of Michal Ajvaz abounds in fantasy motifs and exuberant stories. Motifs include labyrinths, mysterious scripts and languages, and unwonted symbolic objects or books that lead the protagonist into other worlds and stories, set in a space which always acquires a tinge of the mysterious and the fantastic in Ajvaz’s work, e.g. Prague in his novel Druhé město (The Other City, 1993) and later the European cities and the Mediterranean in his extensive novel Cesta na jih (Journey to the South, 2008).

Michal Ajvaz ‘Druhé město’ (The Other City)

A plot set in the magical space of Prague, particularly in Vinohrady, is also typical of Daniela Hodrová’s work, with essayistic, self-reflective and philosophical elements interspersed with an often fragmented storyline, with motifs and subjects such as a mystical initiation ceremony, conversations with deceased strangers and loved ones, blurred boundaries between the world of dreams, memories and reality (e.g. the Podobojí trilogy, 1991; Kukly: Živé obrazy, Hoods: Tableaux Vivants 1991; Théta, Theta, 1992; and more recently e.g. Vyvolávání, Developing, 2010).

The most prominent author casting postmodern doubts on previous events, but at the same time paradoxically respecting the traditional genre of the historical novel was indisputably Vladimír Macura with his tetralogy entitled Ten, který bude (He Who Will Be, 1999). In short stories about both famous and entirely fictitious National Revival characters, Macura’s erudition as a literary historian came to the fore, as did his playfulness and hoaxing, as themes both in his literature and his life.

Playfulness and experimentation, sarcasm, irony, bizarre motifs and topics and his tendency to lyricize language and deeper, darker views of reality and reflections of life were characteristics of other prominent authors during the 1990s who cannot be easily classified in terms of genre, e.g. Václav Kahuda (Houština, Undergrowth, 1999), while Petr Rákos (Korvína čili Kniha o havranech, Korvína or the Book of Ravens, 1993) also published playful, specifically attuned postmodern works and Marian Palla (Zápisky uklízečky Maud, Notes by Maud the Cleaner, 2000) was distinctive for his humour and wit.

The new millennium saw fewer works steeped in the spirit of postmodernism, playfulness, unbridled imagination and fantasy, even if these did continue in many and varied forms to find a special place for themselves in contemporary Czech literature (e.g. prose works by Ivan Matoušek, Patrik Ouředník, Martin Komárek and others).

Prose works aspiring to be social novels

Authentic and postmodern elements can also be found in a broad range of prose that can be characterized as social, i.e. where the authors felt the need to express their experience and views of the overall transformation of the country, reflecting the newly crystallizing society and the political and cultural conditions in the autobiographical journal or novel genre. Contemporary conditions also came to be a subject for the generation of writers who had formerly been active as dissidents, e.g. Ludvík Vaculík (Jak se dělá chlapec, How a Lad is Made, 1993), Eva Kantůrková (Památník, Monument, 1994), Pavel Kohout (Sněžím, I Snow, 1993) and Ivan Klíma (Čekání na tmu, čekání na světlo, Waiting for the Darkness, Waiting for the Light, 1993). Even in the new millennium they did not abandon their poetics or their need to comment on their own lives and the state of society (e.g. in Vaculík’s Loučení k panně, Farewell to the Virgin, 2002, which combines a narrative about a dying love affair with reflections on the social climate).

Pavel Kohout ‘Sněžím’ (I Snow)

Michal Viewegh maintained his own special position in Czech literature throughout this period. In 1992 he published an exceptional successful novel (both among the readers and the literary critics) entitled Báječná léta pod psa, Blissful Years of Lousy Living: this bitter-sweet story of childhood and growing up under normalization, which as the name itself suggests, is neither a cheerful nostalgic memory, nor a straightforward condemnation, but a depiction of the feelings of a large proportion of the population who had muddled through this difficult period one way or another. Viewegh then began to publish commercially successful prose works in quick succession, primarily on love affairs set in a poignantly portrayed contemporary middle class reality, thus becoming the most widely read Czech author. His critical view of the new society and the new phenomena of life in it, the hopes and the disappointments, was also typical of the generation of authors that included Petr Ulrych, Jan Jandourek and Bohuslav Vaněk-Úvalský, whether they viewed the world around them purely through critical, grotesque or satirical eyes.

A special place at the confluence of several streams and trends was taken by Miloš Urban, who developed both occult themes and postmodern playfulness in connection with a particular historical epoch, but at the same time with a strong social-critical charge. His stories are always associated with a specific place or architecture and their occult atmosphere, whether a rural landscape, a cathedral or an entire quarter of a town, and they are always permeated with mystery, and inexplicable and bizarre murders and rituals, as well as the threat of the irreplaceable loss and callous destruction of these places (Hastrman, 2001).

In the latter half of the 1990s authors were also coming to the fore who had chosen a more intimate tone to reflect the mental dispositions and moods of their protagonists, as well as the state of Czech society in their prose works. In this way Jan Balabán’s work presents people who have been afflicted by life, who are alone and unhappy, but still looking for hope in their everyday lives. The oppressive atmosphere and feeling of emptiness is also highlighted by the special backdrop of industrial Ostrava (e.g. in the story collections Možná že odcházíme, 2004 and the novel Zeptej se táty, 2010).

The archetype of the unanchored protagonist who is tired of life and who moves within the circle of his own failures and stereotypes can also be found in the work of Zdeněk Zapletal (Půlnoční pěšci, Midnight Pedestrians, 2000), and Emil Hakl (O rodičích a dětech, Parents and Children, 2002) from a younger generation or Jiří Hájíček (Dobrodruzi hlavního proudu, Mainstream Adventurers, 2002).

One of the most distinctive and hard-to-classify prose works from the entire post-revolutionary period was the novel Sestra (Sister, 1994) by Jáchym Topol. This work, which was considered to be one of the peak achievements of literature at that time entirely surpassed all other output with its experimental and untraditional perception of the world and language. Topol’s kaleidoscopic evocation of the post-1989 social transformation is quite different in its emotionality and elemental and spontaneous narrative style from the other output on that subject at the time.

After publishing a novel set in the present day entitled Anděl (Angel, 1995), presenting the author’s distinctive view of the Smíchov underworld, Topol made a great impression with his prose work Noční práce (Night Work, 2001): in what is at first the realistically portrayed world of two young brothers, their peers and their village community in 1968, he progressively sets out not only a tangle of banal, exciting and hopeless relationships, but also the traumas of history and disturbing, dark and mysterious events and places. In his next novel Kloktat dehet (Gargling Tar, 2005), a postmodern fantasy, Topol again played around with the reality of 1968, this time in a story that offered an alternative history of a post-1948 Czechoslovakia that does not accept the invasion in August 1968 and defends itself to the last breath against the Warsaw Pact tanks.

Captivated by private joys and sorrows

A big topic in the early 1990s was feminism, sometimes of the combatively aggressive kind as in the case of Carola Biedermannová and Eva Hauserová, while others managed to reflect women’s lives in a more effective manner, i.e. not just seeing them in simplified terms of male-female rivalry, and thus presenting a more profound and nuanced testimony. The most prominent women writers who reflected the issues surrounding women’s perceptions of the world included Alexandra Berková (Temná láska, Dark Love 2000) and Zuzana Brabcová: her prose work Rok perel (Year of Pearls, 2000) examines the life of a woman who makes room for her previously suppressed lesbian feelings and a relationship that destroys her and fulfils her at the same time. Tereza Boučková carried on from her samizdat work (Když milujete muže, When You Love a Man, 1995) with prose works characterized by the brief, lapidary notes made by a protagonist frustrated by the behaviour of men and the challenging upbringing of adopted Roma children. She returned to this subject in 2008 with her media-supported novel Rok kohouta (Year of the Rooster), the diary confession of a woman who has to admit to herself and those around her that her happy family project has not succeeded and to find a way out of her personal and creative crisis. Other prominent middle-aged women writers whose work on the subject of finding themselves made quite an impression included Svatava Antošová and then Věra Nosková.

The new millennium witnessed the arrival of a new generation of prose writers who quite rapidly gained prominent positions on the Czech literary scene. Petra Hůlová was a literary discovery and a regularly publishing prose writer. She primarily attracted attention with her debut Paměť mojí babičce, Memory to My Grandmother, (2002), a family saga set in the exotic backdrop of Mongolia. Typical of the author’s manuscript is the urgent, earthy narrative, the colloquial language, the subjects of generational conflicts the status of women in society, the search for identity and the anchorage of characters dogged by loneliness and disappointment.

Another prominent debutante was Petra Soukupová, whose prose works K moři, To the Sea, (2007) and Zmizet, To Disappear (2009) tell of the complex family relations, ancient guilts and traumas that still affect the lives of new generations. Natálie Kocábová presented her characteristic and eccentric style in her novel Monarcha absint, The Monarch Absinthe, (2003), whereas Jana Šrámková gave her gloomy story entitled Hruškadóttir (2008) a quieter, more lyrical tone.

Changes in the new millennium

In the first decade of the new millennium this debt-paying spree of publishing books that could not come out under Communism subsided, as did discussions and polemics over the need for authenticity in modern literary work, while the boom in purely postmodern experimental prose slowly dried up. Postmodern elements basically came to be an organic and unsurprising element of individual literary styles. The retreat from mesmeric, playfully unbridled stories seemed to open up the way for works focusing on specific times and places.

The transformation of a large part of fiction into commercial “goods” and the writers’ loss of their previous privileged position also led to further discussions on literature’s new social function, as well as to a quest for an attractive, topical subject for contemporary work. One starting point appeared to be the unatoned guilt and moral dilemmas surrounding “history at large”, which seemed to be still awaiting basic consideration in the social and artistic spheres.

The increasing distance in time since the fall of the Communist regimes together with the generational change have brought about a wave of what is known as ostalgy, i.e. a nostalgic yearning for the Communist era (frequently seen from just a child’s perspective), which was also projected into literary production. The most distinctive trend in prose at the beginning of the third millennium was the thematic return to the 1940s-1980s. Writers were drawn in particular to the traumatic postwar period, which could be used in their works as a backdrop for thrilling action and distinctive figures. A favourite subject was the injustices perpetrated during the liberation and the expulsion of the Germans, as well as the Communist persecutions during the 1950s. In contrast the normalization years were a more intimate, often tragicomic space for childhood and youth. The return of the grand narrative was a great success: a realistic, gripping, broadly based story, often in the form of a family saga.

In addition to the “escape into history”, the new work that increasingly emphasized the way the world was opening up also began to include works that dealt with the search for living opportunities beyond the borders, whether in a totally globalized “Euroworld” in which everybody was dealing with more or less the same problems in analogous environments, or in remote, exotic locations which have hitherto retained their original character and distinctiveness.

What was characteristic was the authorial participation of the younger generation, i.e. the one that went out into the world after the revolution in 1989 to gain knowledge, or even younger authors for whom it was quite normal to spend the first years of adulthood out seeking experience in the world, both for study and for working reasons.

Despite these new trends, prose works in traditional genres using tried and tested authorial poetics continued to appear. The outpouring of literature on private relations and women’s fortunes was strong, both at the level of “highbrow” literature and at the transition to popular genres. Social novels increasingly ranged round the social-historical level (i.e. an additional normalization period or older plot line was added to the contemporary family plot).

Around the end of the 2000s, as a reaction to repeated assertions that Czech literature was undergoing a crisis, a debate emerged over the need to create an “engaged” work that would successfully respond to current political and social events; this programmatic hypothesis of several literary critics and writers, particularly poets, indicated that this should primarily mean left-wing engagement. However, such claims on literature had a greater resonance in literary polemics than in specific artistic works. If we do not include tabloid-style prose (or scandal-mongering confessions and biographies) satirizing and criticizing contemporary circumstances and high politics, the closest who came to this with regard to their poetics and readership were quite a varied band of authors: Miloš Urban, Michal Viewegh and Emil Hakl (with his novel Skutečná událost, Real Event, 2013).

Emil Hakl ‘Skutečná událost’ (Real Event)

Opening up to the world

Prose works set in foreign climes do not make up a uniform trend: the exotic backdrop often plays various roles, e.g. it can serve as an attractive external setting, a way to gain knowledge of another culture or an element that points up postmodern storytelling and the like.

One of the first works of this kind, a literary sensation, was the novel Nebe pod Berlínem, Sky Beneath Berlin (2002) by Jaroslav Rudiš. A narrative that came out of a short-term attachment, stylized as a sudden escape to an unknown city with an attempt to burn bridges and to start life afresh elsewhere and in a different way, it is a sequence of stories centring around various characters from a German city, particularly those whose lives are bound to the U-Bahn, i.e. the Underground. Other novels by Jaroslav Rudiš are set in Germany or some other primarily Central or Western European space, and their protagonists are young people who are looking for themselves in a globalized world.

The exotic backdrops also stand out in Petra Hůlová’s work, particularly in her debut Paměť mojí babičce, Memory to my Grandmother (2002), which tells the story of several generations of Mongolian women in the traditional environment of a family living on the steppes and in the vacuous relations and backdrop of the big city.

Siberia came to be the setting for another novel by Petra Hůlová Stanice Tajga, Taiga Station (2008), and a two-part novel by Martin Ryšavý Cesty na Sibiř, Roads to Siberia (2008), whose autobiographical narrator spends several journeys to the east getting to know the inhabitants of the Siberian taiga and its cities with all their post-Soviet paradoxes, shamanic teachings, nomadic traditions, broad Russian soul and strong alcohol.

Petra Hůlová

The exotic environment of South America is at the centre of attention for Hispanist Markéta Pilátová, as that is where she set her novels Žluté oči vedou domů, Yellow Eyes Lead Home (2007) and Má nejmilejší kniha, My Most Beloved Book (2009), in which she compares the lives of the locals with their European forebears and the traumas of history that their contemporaries still have to deal with. In Hana Androniková’s novel Nebe nemá dno, Heaven Has No Bottom (2010) the South American jungle and North American prairie provide a backdrop for the chief protagonist to get to know herself and a way for her to heal her body.

A quite special role is played by foreign lands in the work of middle and older generation authors, for whom this space is associated with the personal and family trauma of forced emigration (e.g. Edgar Dutka, Lubomír Martínek and Ivan Landsmann).

The past from the present viewpoint

Historical novels came out as a special genre throughout this period and in their more popular forms (i.e. as detective stories or pulp romances) they were indeed much sought after by readers, as can be seen in the novels of Ludmila Vaňková and later Vlastimila Vondruška. Earlier ages did not appear too much as literary inspiration in respected work (except in the unique prose of Miloš Urban), however the 20th century was increasingly seen as relevant, i.e. the period was understood to be an interface between the past and the present. Although novels reflecting this stage in modern Czech history were still coming out during the 1990s (e.g. Zdeněk Šmíd’s Cejch, Brand in 1992, a story of changing relations between Czechs and Germans in the Sudetenland “from the beginnings to the present day”), they clearly enjoyed a boom just around the turn of the millennium.

Whereas authentic literary works in the forms that they came out in during the early 1990s only came out exceptionally in the new millennium, what were known as memoir-novels were now increasingly frequent. These were autobiographical memoirs dealing with the political upheavals and complicated changes experienced by the older generation of writers, enhanced by meditations and psychologizing and not above looser storytelling (e.g. Pavel Kohout: To byl můj život??, That Was My Life??, 2005; Ota Filip: Osmý čili nedokončený životopis, An Eighth or Incomplete Biography, 2007, and other works).

One of the most prominent trends involved works that drew on the traumas arising out of Czech-German relations, exacerbated during the war and the subsequent expulsions. Some of these focused on fateful epic tales of entire families and touched on such subjects as Jewishness and the Holocaust. In contrast to previous waves of prose on these subjects, the latest output was characterized by an emphasis on factographic work with sources and literature, which authors used as inspiration for their fiction narratives: it was not unusual for real individuals and their fortunes to be behind these stories and characters. Otherwise this kind of work avoided experimentation, going instead for traditional, realist narrative and a strong plot. That is how Hana Androniková conceived her novel Zvuk slunečních hodin, The Sound of the Sundial (2001), while Aaronův skok, Aaron’s Leap (2006), the tale of three generations of women affected by the Holocaust trauma, by Magdalena Platzová, is rather more intimate in mood. “Classics” such as Arnošt Lustig and Josef Škvorecký also returned to the Holocaust at this time; Květa Legátová, supposedly a debutante from the oldest generation, remained a solitary figure, who commanded attention not only with her novella Jozova Hanule Joza’s Hanule (2002), from the wartime period, but particularly with her short story collection Želary (2001), inspired by her hard life in Kopanice in Moravian Silesia, seemingly unaffected by time and evoking rural life back in the 1920s and 1930s.

Hana Andronikova ‘Zvuk slunečních hodin’ (The Sound of the Sundial)

Younger generation authors of both genders then began to see the Czech-German conflict in a much more focused light, and in contrast to the older interpretation of Czech history (offering an image of good Czechs and bad Germans) they mostly reflected the violence and lawlessness inflicted by the Czechs on the Germans. Hence a central topic came to be the postwar expulsion of the Germans. Hence an innocent German girl suffers throughout her life due to the principle of collective guilt in Kateřina Tučková’s novel Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch, The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch (2009), while an old Jewish German woman tries to obtain an apology and reconciliation among unapproachable Czechs in Radka Denemarková’s novel Peníze od Hitlera, Money from Hitler (2006).

Precariously violent scenes were avoided by a series of smaller novellas that reflected the space abandoned by the Sudetens and characterized more by a lyrical tone expressing the feeling of solitude and irreplaceable loss in a place that will always have its secret. A Sudetenland perceived in this way can always be found in the work of Martin Fibiger, Jaroslav Rudiš, Martin Sichinger, Evita Naušová and others.

Another period that attracted the attention of quite a few prose writers was the 1950s, the events of which were often justifiably associated with, and organically stemmed from, the traumas of the 1940s. This tragic and lawless period offered strong stories, characters and moral dilemmas that also related to topical discussions nationwide, e.g. in the case of Jan Novák’s successful novel Zatím dobrý, So Far So Good (2004) about the Mašín brothers‘ resistance activities.

Novák’s next novel Děda, Grandfather (2007) was about another important subject from contemporary history, the forced collectivization of the countryside. There follows a series of boyhood memories from the narrator as an adult man, whose family experienced repeated ups and downs but who never gave up entirely to the ruling powers. The subject of collectivization was also dealt with in a detective story that delved into forebears’ ancient guilt by Jiří Hájíček in his novel Selský baroko, Rustic Baroque (2005). The closer his chief protagonist gets to specific historical sources and testimonies, the clearer it is that a judgment on an ancient dispute and a just, unbiased verdict is just not going to happen today.

Ancient family guilt and the burdens that affect the protagonists to this day and continue to distort relations between them are the subject of a novel by Tomáš Zmeškal, Milostný dopis klínovým písmem, Love Letter in Cuneiform (2008), as well as an extensive family saga by Pavel Brycz Patriarchátu dávno zašlá sláva, Patriarchate of Long Fade Glory (2003). The fortunes of a family started by a descendent of a unique Ukrainian patriarch after the First World War in the Sudetenland represents the fate of Czechoslovakia as a whole for several generations, as well as the breakdown of the traditional male role in the (post)modern world.

Authors born in the 1940s often adopt a child’s vision of reality (while acknowledging their autobiographical inspiration) in their work, which is thus full of tragicomic almost slapstick experiences and figures from an otherwise traumatic time, thus disrupting the otherwise traditional black and white perception of reality at that time. A distinctive head of a family, a tailor, who cures Stalin himself appears in Pecháček’s Osvobozené kino Mír, Liberated Peace Cinema (2002), while bitter-sweet memories and reflections can be found in a work by Antonín Bajaja Na krásné modré Dřevnici, On the Beautiful, Blue Dřevnice (2009), and the narrative of a young boy who has to live in a children’s home after his mother is imprisoned, is both tough and brittle (Edgar Dutka: U útulku 5, At Home 5, 2003).

Normalization grey

A child’s view of the world has been typical of another productive trend in recent Czech prose, namely works that reflect life under normalization. One of the first and most prominent works (which has also entered public awareness thanks to its successful theatrical production) was Hrdý Budžes, Mr B. Proudew, by Irena Dousková (1998). This naively honest view of little Helenka’s takes the reader into her unique world, which comically distorts the cheerless normalized reality while critically revealing it. This prose work is continued in the novel Oněgin byl Rusák, Onegin was a Rusky (2006), which is now the “traditional” narrative of Helena the student, who sees the reality around her with the critical and uncompromising vision of somebody forced to grow up in unfree conditions. A critical view of the small town society in which she lived and of her own family during the sixties and the seventies also gave rise to a trilogy of novels by Věra Nosková Bereme, co je, We Take What Is (2006), Obsazeno, Occupied (2007) and Víme svý, We Know Our Own Know (2008).

A disillusioned view of the inescapable world of normalization can also be seen in a work by Jan Balabán (Kudy šel anděl, Where the Angel Went, 2003) and the novel Stopy za obzor, Footprints Leading Beyond the Horizon (2006) by Pavel Kolmačka, in which the search for and attainment of Christian faith is prominently visible. A cheerless normalization adolescence marred by the threat that her native region would be destroyed by the construction of a dam is described by the protagonist of an extensive prose work by Jiří Hájíček Rybí krev, Fish Blood (2012).

Jiří Hájíček ‘Rybí krev’ (Fish Blood)

A frequently used compositional approach in these and other prose works is a narrative based on two time levels: a normalization childhood and post-1989 adulthood. The protagonist might well be living in freedom, when the frontiers and prohibitions that he had to deal with previously are now coming to an end, but not even this time of new opportunities brings him happiness or peace of mind: the protagonists in these works have been irreversibly affected by normalization, so the living conditions, personality adjustment and experienced traumas have an influence on their fortunes in subsequent stages of their lives.

On the other hand a warmer narrative tone regarding family troubles in difficult times, when bright moments and flashes of simple human happiness can always be found, is typical of Martin Fahrner’s work. Steiner aneb Co jsme dělali, Steiner or What We Did (2002) is the story of an ordinary family before and after 1989, in which even apparently lost souls tirelessly fight for a fully experienced life, family and happiness (it is not by chance that the story is permeated by the motif of football as a symbol of fighting spirit and indomitability).

An alternative to fixed standpoints on normalization and post-1989 times was provided by Petra Hůlová in Strážci občanského dobra, Guardians of the Civic Good (2010), teetering on the interface between the social novel, satire and hoax-like games. The narrator is a somewhat eccentric and backward young lady growing up in a fictional experimental Krakow combining the reality of normalization lifestyle in Czechoslovakia and an image of the entirely exhausted and impoverished totalitarian system of a developing state.

A quite different digression is the collection of short stories by Milan Kozelka Život na Kdysissippi, Life on the Missedissippi (2008), which presents the untraditional “saints” and “classics” of the pre-1989 underground.

Milan Kozelka

Post-1989 output set off in various directions and has so far outlived quite a few doubts and critical predictions. In spite of everything a number of distinctive literary works have remained in the public awareness over the last twenty years, surviving the times that gave them birth and enriching Czech literature as a whole. However, the literature of the new millennium keeps moving on, and only greater hindsight will show which of these movements and trends are still viable and productive in years to come. In current literary output we can so far only note a significant new phenomenon, namely prose inspired by real life stories, presenting biographical tales that are often on the borderline between literary and non-fiction prose (e.g. Jan Němec: Dějiny světla, A History of Light, 2013; Irena Dousková: Medvědí tanec, Bear Dance, 2014; Martin Reiner: Básník, Poet, 2014), but future years will show whether this output will result in more prominent works.

Translated by Graeme Dibble

Dozens of excellent Czech books were published in 2016, which undoubtedly deserve to be translated and read in many languages. This feature presents the most important literary fiction of the year — eight books which have been widely read in the Czech Republic, received critical acclaim and have the potential to appeal to international readers.

Contents

Bianca Bellová: The Lake

Jiří Hájíček: The Rainstick

Petr Stančík: An Angel’s Egg

Zuzana Brabcová: Aviaries

Zuzana Kultánová: Augustin Zimmermann

Marek Toman: The Praise of Opportunism

Marek Šindelka: Material Fatigue

Emil Hakl: Uma’s Version

Bianca Bellová

The Lake
Jezero

(Host, 192 pages)

This novel deservedly received widespread attention from readers and almost universal critical acclaim, which led to nominations for the EU Prize for Literature and the Magnesia Litera Award. Bellová has written a dystopian page-turner combining literary fiction with genre elements. Set near a lake that is drying up and ominously pushing out its banks, this novel is an archetypal story of the coming of age of a young boy who fights his way out of a tough environment as he searches for his roots in the contaminated soil of his devastated lakeland home. For its hero, who embarks on his journey with nothing but a bundle of nerves and a coat that was once his grandad’s, it is a pilgrimage. To get to the greatest mystery, he must sail across and walk around the lake and finally sink to its bottom. Polish, Arabic, Bulgarian and Macedonian translations are in preparation and an excerpt from the text has been selected for the 2017 Susanna Roth Award for beginner translators of Czech.

Praise

“You will read Bianca Bellová’s raw, ruthless, apocalyptic prose with astonishment. It’s a stubborn and prickly book, which resists the reader until the last sentence, yet you won’t be able to put it down. Such a confidently and authentically written work with a clear intention, precise and seamless, deserves awards.”

— Kateřina Kadlecová, Reflex

“Bianca Bellová has enriched Czech literature with a harsh dystopia, one of the most remarkable books of recent years.”

— Alena Slezáková, MF Dnes

Links

Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

Excerpt ▼

I. Embryo

Nami, bathed in sweat, holds his grandma’s blubbery hand. The waves from the lake slap against the concrete jetty. He hears the sound of screams, shrieks, coming from the town beach. It must be a Sunday if he’s here on the blanket with his grandma and grandpa. There’s one other person here too. He recalls the three dark spots of a swimsuit, three triangles of a bikini, with a long dark tail of hair hanging down, brushed out like the tail of a horse, and two dark tufts of hair visible in the underarms. The three triangles move slowly in the sun, turning over again and again, until there is only one. A little ways offshore, a catfish lazily flicks its tail.

“The surface seems lower than it used to be,” Nami’s grandma says, smacking a fly as it lands on her belly. She chews roasted sunflower seeds, bought from the stand on the beach, spitting the shells onto the concrete in front of her.

“What’re you talking about?” Nami’s grandpa says with a laugh. “Women’s wisdom—second worst thing in the world, next to a hangover!”

Nami’s grandpa rocks back as he laughs, hands on his thighs. Wedged between the fingers of one of his dirty, chewed-up hands is an unfiltered cigarette.
The three triangles pick up a thermos, turn to Nami, and pour him a cup of mint tea.

“Have a drink, love.” Well, what do you know? The three triangles have a voice. It’s pleasantly deep, like the old well behind their house. Nami takes a drink. The tea, sweetened with honey, is delicious. It slides down his throat with no resistance.

“Let’s go then, love,” his grandpa says in a placating voice. “Wouldn’t want anyone calling you a sissy. Every boy of three in these parts needs to know how to swim.”

He runs a hand over his rounded belly. Flicks the cigarette butt into the water, where it lands with a hiss. Nami doesn’t want to go in the water. He wants to lie on the blanket, resting his head on his grandma’s soft belly and watching the three red triangles. He attempts to lift a hand, but it just drops lazily back in his lap.

“Go on, Nami,” his grandma says. “I’ll buy you a lollipop.”

The lollipops always have cellophane stuck to them. You can never get it off. The only time Nami ever gets one is World Peace Day or when the three triangles come to visit. They taste of burnt sugar and violets. He doesn’t really like the taste, but to get one is so rare that he looks forward to it every time and does whatever he’s asked to do.

Nami slowly gets to his feet, but before he can fully stand he finds himself flying through the air.

“Now swim, sturgeon!” his grandpa shouts, bursting into laughter. The three triangles scream. So does Nami’s grandma. Landing painfully on his side, Nami breaks through the surface and sinks down through the dark water. Looking up, he can see the faint shine of the sun in the swarm of bubbles trailing behind him. His lungs ache, he’s had the wind knocked out of him. The deeper he sinks, the colder the water gets. Nami sinks numbly, arms outstretched, flapping at his side. Any second now, he thinks, he’s going to see the Spirit of the Lake, which lives at the bottom. The pressure on his lungs grows, his ears feel like they’re about to explode. Instinctively he gasps for breath and swallows a mouthful of water. He can’t see anymore. He waves his arms and legs wildly, struggling toward the surface. Everything is black and shiny.

“Stupid old fool,” his grandma says as Nami finally catches his breath and starts furiously coughing up dirty water. “You old ass, I wouldn’t trust you with a can of worms!”

“What’s wrong? He’s fine, isn’t he? You saw the boy swim, right?” Nami’s grandpa says in a defensive tone. His voice is trembling slightly. “A true warrior!”

“Come here, love,” the three triangles say from the depths of the earth, wrapping Nami into their arms. One pounding chest on another. Nami settles down and stops coughing. The skin beneath the triangles is warm and bronze and smells wonderful. The three triangles hold him close, kissing his hair and speaking in whispers. The woman’s hair tickles his face, and she begins to sing.

“Don’t sing to him!” the old lady shouts. Nami shudders, but then lies still again. He doesn’t move a muscle, pretending he’s dead, that he doesn’t even exist. The singing falls away to nothing but a thick sound with each exhale, like the vibrations of a bell dying down after the clapper has stopped. Nami wishes he could stay that way forever. He steals a glance at the woman’s face, but all he can see is the tip of her nose and her prominent cheekbones.When they walk home, Nami faints and his grandpa has to carry him.

Instead of going across the square with the statue of the Statesman and the ditch the Russians bulldozed for trash, they take the back way, around the apartment complex.
“You’re quite a load, boy,” grumbles Nami’s grandpa. His foot slips and he freezes, barely catching his balance in time to avoid a fall. They reach home and Nami gets his lollipop. He licks it more out of obligation than enjoyment. Out the corner of his eye he watches the three triangles, which meanwhile have changed into a blue-and-green flowerprint dress. He touches it when he has the chance, and is rewarded with a wonderful smell.
That evening Nami has a violent vomiting fit. His stomach contracts uncontrollably, ejecting torrents of dirty water, mint tea, and lumps of sheep cheese blini. The blue-and-green flowerprint dress strokes his forehead, holding his head while he vomits, wiping his mouth and whispering in a soothing voice. “Shh, love, everything’s going to be all right.”
The next morning, when Nami wakes up, the blue-and-green dress is gone. He takes a sip of black Russian tea and vomits it right back up.

***

Nami grew up surrounded by the smell of fish, so he never really noticed it. The small town of Boros has a sturgeon hatchery and, right next door, a fish processing plant. Alea, their neighbor, works in the fish factory. Sometimes she comes over to sit on their doorstep, and brings a bucket of caviar to trade for a sack of potatoes. Then Nami has to eat caviar every day for breakfast and dinner, sitting over the bucket, scooping it up by the spoonful, until he’s sick to his stomach.

“You ate it all?” his grandma asks. Nami lowers his eyes and stares at the floor.

“That’s all right,” his grandma says. “Caviar is the healthiest thing in the world. Next to ginseng!”
“And next to a good fuck,” the old man says with a grin from the corner of the room. He rubs the corner of his eye with his thumb, gripping an unfiltered cigarette between his index finger and his misshapen middle finger.

“Grandpa, you should be ashamed!” Nami’s grandma chides him, but she too is grinning. She fries a batch of blini and slathers them with butter. “You eat like a VIP,” she says, smiling at Nami as she fills his plate. Nami likes caviar, but he feels like that can’t be all there is. He hopes that something more meaningful lies in store, but at four years old he doesn’t have the words yet to express it. He crushes the little black beads between his teeth, absently picking at the scab on his knee.

His grandma has a big lump on her tailbone, broad bony hips, and a soft tummy that Nami likes to fall asleep on. She strokes his hair with a hard, dry hand as she tells him stories about the Spirit of the Lake and the warriors of the Golden Horde, who sleep in the Kolos cliff, waiting until the great warrior comes to wake them up.

“Will that be me?” Nami asks.

“Yes, it will, my boy,” his grandma smiles.

“But how will I find them?”

“Providence will show you the way, love.”

Nami hears his grandma’s words and peacefully drifts off to sleep.

***

It’s Fishery Day, the biggest holiday of the year. The whole town is gathered on the square around the statue of the Statesman. The children are dressed in snow-white shirts, the boys with colorful neckties, the girls with ribbons in their hair. Akel the vendor, who normally sells herring and sunflower seeds from his stall, also has cotton candy and luscious doughnuts, soaked in burned fat. Today is the day when none of the fishermen go out on the lake, because they’re all celebrating. By eleven a.m., almost nobody’s left standing on their feet; they have sacrificed too mightily to the Spirit of the Lake.

The chairman of the fish processing plant delivers a long speech, singing the praises of progress and collectivization as he shifts his gaze from the lake to the sky and back again. A man with a shaman’s headdress on—though nobody mentions him, as if he weren’t really there—dances around the statue of the Statesman. The Russian engineers and their wives, standing in the first line of listeners, are dressed in big-city fashion; the women in high heels, leather purses over their arms, hair brushed high. The local women speak of them with contempt; sometimes they even spit. One of the small Russian boys, despite the dumb look on his face, is an object of admiration, riding back and forth across the square in a squeaky pedal car. Nami can’t take his eyes off of him. He grips his grandma’s sweaty hand, crossing his legs; he badly needs to go pee. In one hand he holds a parade waver shaped like a fish. His grandpa stands next to him on the other side, swaying unsteadily, head drooping; every now and then he loudly smacks his lips. They hear the sound of thunder, or maybe gunfire from the Russian barracks. The Russian engineers and their wives look at one another in disgust and shake their heads. Nobody has been listening to the speech for a while now. The women converse in a lowered voice, but nobody leaves, out of courtesy. They all have their minds on the banquet that awaits them in the fish processing plant: blini with caviar, herring in mayonnaise, onion tarts, blackberry wine for the women, and plenty of hard liquor for their men. Nami can’t stop watching the green pedal car, cruising over the bumps and potholes like a tank. He tries to look away but can’t. Even when he shuts his eyes he still sees the car. His insides ache, squirming with envy.
“Can we go now, Grandma?”

“Soon, just hold on.”

“How much longer?”

“Just a little while.”

For a five-year-old boy, a little while is practically an eternity.

“Grandma?”

“What is it now?”

Nami says nothing.

“You peed yourself.”

Nami’s grandpa wakes from his snooze and looks around uncertainly.

“The boy peed himself,” Nami’s grandma whispers, elbowing the old man.

“Idiot,” he rasps.

A stain slowly spreads across the front of Nami’s shorts as a stream of urine runs down his thighs. The thunder rumbles again, and this time there’s lightning too. Wind whips the last few pages of the speech the factory chairman still has left in front of him, and without further warning the sky rips open, water gushing like when Nami’s grandma empties out the washtub. As the women’s hair collapses, blue makeup streams down their faces in hydrologic maps, and their high heels slip in the mud that has suddenly formed on the square, but the chairman of the fish factory won’t stop speaking. The statue of the Statesman silently raises its arms to the sky. In an instant, Nami is soaked to the skin. All that’s left of his parade wand is a wooden rod and streaks of red paint on his arm. The square has turned into a ploughed field, people sunk in mud up to their ankles and losing their shoes. The boy in the pedal car gets stuck in the mud and starts crying. Nami’s grandpa tips his head back and lets the rain fall on his face. The square lies on a slight slope, so it doesn’t take the boys long to realize the mud is great for sliding in. Akel desperately tries to keep his stand from slipping away downhill. Doughnuts tumble off the counter, dropping in the mud.

“It’s the Apocalypse,” Nami’s grandpa mumbles, beginning to sober up.

Water continues to pour from the sky, gradually filling the boy’s pedal car. The microphone gives out entirely, but the chairman goes on speaking. It’s like a silent comedy, except for the roar of the rain and the thunder, which every now and then strikes so nearby that Nami’s grandma twitches and looks toward the lake with terror on her face. The shaman slowly walks away, gripping his headdress. Then, following his lead, the masses of people hypnotically stir into motion. The factory chairman lowers his arm holding the microphone. Water runs down the collar of his jacket, down his shirt. He gazes accusingly at the sky. Nami can’t help himself, overcome by uncontrollable laughter, giggling like a madman. His grandma rolls her eyes at him, but Nami just laughs even more, still laughing hysterically as his grandma drags him home by the hand.

Nami doesn’t stop laughing until they cross the threshold of his house. His grandma slaps him across his sopping-wet thighs and his laughter finally stops, but he still hiccups long into the night.

They caught a lot of fish that year.

***

Sometimes Nami wakes up in the morning in bed and the sun is shining into his eyes. It must be vacation, since otherwise his grandma would have woken him up. It’s probably warmer outside than indoors. From the kitchen Nami can hear his grandpa’s smoker’s cough and the horn of a tugboat in the distance. He throws his arms and legs wide on the bed and stares up at the ceiling, where bunches of thyme and lady’s-mantle are drying. He feels like he could spend the rest of his life like this. If he sits up in bed, he can see all the way to the lake. He stretches out and puts on his clothes. On the kitchen table he finds a plateful of doughnuts waiting, fried for breakfast by his grandma. They’re only lukewarm now. He runs outside, determined to build a hideout in the branches that will hold up—not like last time, when it all fell apart and he got a scrape on his back.

The only tree for miles around is a cherry tree with a reddish-brown trunk that got struck by lightning, now half its branches are withered. Nami drags over a few large boards of various length and thickness. They slip and start to fall, he has to tie them together with rope. He tries to nail them in place with his grandpa’s carpenter’s hammer, which weighs at least ten pounds. The tree groans, the branches shake, and the boards resist, sliding away. The nail runs right through the board into empty space.

“For fuck’s sake!” Nami screams, throwing the hammer to the ground.

“What are you doing up there, boy?” Nami’s grandpa bellows, stepping out of the outhouse. “Lucky for you you don’t have a father, you miserable brat, or he’d tan your hide!”

Nami stops and thinks a minute, wondering what it would be like to have his hide tanned by a father. He actually likes the idea.

“Our only tree and he goes and wrecks it. As if he hasn’t done enough damage already,” Nami’s grandpa hollers in the direction of his grandma. She stands with one hand propped on her hip, the other one shading her eyes as she searches for Nami.

Nami sits on the ground now, behind the toolshed, breaking rocks. He lifts the heavy hammer high over his head, then brings it down, closing his eyes. He repeats the motion again and again, till streams of sweat run off of him and the stone turns to dust. He finds it satisfying. He stares in amazement at the palms of his hands, which have broken out in huge blisters. He tosses the hammer into the grass and runs down to the lake to wash off the dust.

“C’mere, you little runt! I’ll hammer you like a nail!” his grandpa shouts after him. Nami keeps running. He knows his grandpa will never catch him.

***

“I don’t know, but it seems weird to me, having the fish processing plant right next to the hatchery,” Nami’s neighbor Alea muses. “I know fish’ve got little brains, but still. It’s like putting a graveyard next to the hospital where babies are born, don’t you think?”

“Pour us some more Chardonnay, boy,” says Nami’s grandma, sitting at the table. Nami tops up their shotglasses with potato spirits. His grandma runs a hand over the plastic tablecloth, breathes a sigh, and stares off into the distance.

“Not many of ’em either and they’re dying like flies,” Alea goes on.

“What?” Nami’s grandma replies absently. Today she and Alea are rolling dough for bureks, one sheet after the next, coating it with a layer of butter, then laying another layer on top. Instead of a rolling pin, they use a three-foot-long wooden bar, like the one they have in the school gymnasium. Nami’s grandma huffs and puffs, setting her hands behind her hips and stretching her back.
“The sturgeons,” Alea says, visibly annoyed.
The house is painted blue, with a white roof. The door is made of hard black locust. The roof has a hole in it. When the weather’s nice, it lets in sunbeams; when it’s raining, water. Little snakes live underneath the old floorboards, but they’re harmless, vanishing into the cracks at the first sound of footsteps. Nami’s grandma says they keep good luck in the house, and pours milk into a dish for them.

The house sits on a little hill overlooking the lake. From the front door you can see the boats sailing back into harbor. It’s just one step up to the stoop with the railing. Nami’s grandma likes to sit there and watch the men returning home. Elbows propped against the table, she knits, embroiders, slices vegetables for dinner, peels potatoes, pits cherries with a hairpin, receives visitors.

“I don’t like the looks of it,” she says wearily. Heavy clouds are gathering on the horizon, where the lake comes to an end. That usually means a storm is on the way.

“Don’t be so gloomy!” Alea says. “More Chardonnay, Nami. We get those clouds from the east here every April.”

The old lady sighs, sprinkling lumps of sheep cheese onto the layer of dough. “Look, the Spirit is frowning. He’s still angry.”

“Be quiet.”

“That wasn’t enough.”

“Shush!”

“He still wants more!”

The sky above the lake looks heavy as lead. The ponderous clouds cover over the horizon like a fat old man atop his wife on their wedding night. Nami is collecting snails from the garden and stacking them in a pile. He calls it snail school, pairing them in schoolbenches, frowning as he scolds them for giving the wrong answer. Sometimes he even uses a cane.

“I’m worried, Alea,” Nami’s grandma says softly, hanging her hands at her side.

“Me too, you old goose,” Alea says, giving her a hug. The two women fall together to form a sculpture, pressing close as hard as they can, trembling—how many times have they done this before? Someday, someone will make a statue of the fisherman’s wife, shading her eyes as she gazes out to the horizon; whole throngs of women, their right arms taut with muscle from constantly gazing out to sea.
“Go run and fetch the shaman, Nami!” his grandma calls to him.
“Don’t go anywhere, Nami. Your grandma’s drunk,” Alea corrects her. Nami rubs his hands on his thighs, awaiting further orders.

“They’ll come back. They always do, you silly thing. Don’t get hysterical,” Alea says, giving Nami’s grandma an awkward pat on the arm.

As she pulls the burek out of the oven, the first drops begin to fall. They chew the buttery dough, peering out the window through the torrents of water streaming down. Neither woman says a word.
Nami lies on the ground in his room, up on the second floor, drawing in his notebook with his grandpa’s purple ink pen. The rain pounds against the windowpanes, the wind slaps the loose sheet tied to the shed. He’s got the transistor radio on, tuned in to the same program he listens to every night. A soothing female voice recites the 24-hour forecast for sailors and fishermen. In a rich, full alto, she announces the wind speed and expected rainfall and cloud conditions for each individual part of the lake. She describes gale-force winds of 10 on the Beaufort scale with the same steady voice as she does a breeze rustling the leaves in the trees. Nami finds it calming. He lays his head down on the floor and falls asleep. When he wakes up in the morning, the sky looks swept clean and the sun is blazing hot. His body feels like it’s broken and he’s starving. He goes downstairs to get breakfast. He looks at his hands and discovers they’re covered in purple ink. There’s a candle burning on the kitchen table, and his grandma sits in the corner, leaning her back against the wall, staring wide-eyed straight ahead.
Nami’s grandpa, Alea’s husband, and six other fishermen are missing.

(Translated by Alex Zucker)

Jiří Hájíček

The Rainstick
Dešťová hůl

(Host, 280 pages)

Hájíček is a well-established author whose bestselling novels, with their deceptively simple and traditional narrative style, are regularly nominated for all the major Czech literary awards. He is a two-time Magnesia Litera Award winner and his books have been translated into a number of languages including English, Italian and Polish. In The Rainstick, Zbyněk, a land administrator, meets a former love he hasn’t seen for many years, in order to help her with an apparently simple property-related problem. Having returned to the country village in which he was born and grew up, Zbyněk is gradually apprised of the unclear circumstances of a land dispute; at the same time he becomes embroiled in personal and marital crisis. He struggles with insomnia, loses his way in the countryside and cadastral maps, while a crazy 18th-century rustic aviator hovers above him like an apparition. A turning point is reached when Zbyněk goes into battle with his face covered in war paint. The Rainstick has already won the prestigious Lidové noviny Book of the Year Award and has been nominated for the Czech Book Award.

Praise

“The Rainstick is one of the most powerful prose works of the year”

— Radim Kopáč, MF Dnes

“The conclusion of The Rainstick will reverberate in the reader for a long time. Hájíček is an exceptional storyteller”

— Ivan Hartman, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Author website: www.hajicek.info
Foreign rights: www.dbagency.cz
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

Petr Stančík

An Angel’s Egg
Andělí vejce

(Druhé město, 200 pages)

Stančík, author of the Magnesia Litera Award-winning Mummy Mill, has written another playful and linguistically rich novel for lovers of imaginative historical fiction. History books give 8 May 1945 as the date when World War II officially ended in Europe. Few people know that in the Czech Republic, it lasted a few days longer. The author has chosen this lesser known historical event as the backdrop to his latest novel, which blends two story lines. In the first one, we follow the story of the book’s protagonist, Augustin Hnát: his birth and youth in the countryside; meeting his first love; the battles of the First World War, which take him to the farthest reaches of Siberia; and finally, the 12th of May, 1945. The second story line describes the fateful last day, as experienced by the Hnát, from dawn till dusk. Both story lines merge in a dramatic finale where humour turns to tragedy. An Angel’s Egg deserves as much international attention as the critically acclaimed Mummy Mill, which has been published in Spanish, Polish and Hungarian.

Praise

“Inspired by Kafka, Petr Stančík dishes out a combination of carefully researched historical curiosities, poetic images and lies.”

— Michal Šanda, Právo

“Despite all the humour, hyperbole, literary gluttony and wacky situations, An Angel’s Egg leads to such a powerful and tragic wartime finale that it will make your skin crawl.”

— Ivan Hartman, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: druhemesto.cz

Excerpt ▼

21st February 1898

It was just after Christmas when Augustin fell in love with his classmate, Lenka Číšecká. The only problem was that he didn’t understand his feelings and being in love made him feel ill. So he blamed all of this on Lenka, which is why he also tormented her – he’d put a hairy caterpillar in her sandwich, stick blobs of wax in her long hair, which was the shape and colour of sun-drenched flax tow, or deliberately give away the ending to a fairy tale while she was in the middle of reading it.

Lenka endured all of this with patience beyond her years because she loved Augustin too and believed that one day he’d learn to master his feelings.

Their teacher, Mr Nebejas, was aware of all this, and even though he liked Augustin as much as all his other pupils, or perhaps even a little more, he would often punish him for bothering Lenka, but always in tandem with another offender. This was because Nebejas never beat the children with a cane or a ruler. If someone behaved badly, then they would face a feared method he called “the water of life”: the offenders stood opposite each other, stretched out their arms, palms down, and the teacher placed a cup of water on their hands. You could stop whenever you wanted, but the boys began to compete against each other and wouldn’t give in. The first one who did was labelled a coward. And so they would stand there for long minutes, eyes fixed on the trembling cups, teeth clenched in pain, and sweat dripping from their foreheads into their eyes which they couldn’t even wipe away.

The genius of the water of life lay in the fact that the miscreants punished themselves and no traces of this torture were left on their bodies. The only disadvantage was that there had to be at least two of them.

Augustin could hold the cup longer than anyone else and over time had begun to develop a nice set of biceps.

The teacher felt even more sympathy for Lenka because he himself was very lonely. His only knowledge of female anatomy came from a fold-out atlas of the human body, and his one love was history. He felt embarrassed in the presence of women, and a simple calculation told him that he couldn’t support a family on his derisory teacher’s salary.

But when it came to history he was transformed from a shy virgin into a fearless warrior. For example, when he learned from the old chronicles that the neighbouring village of Kosmo had not been named after the universe, but after the fact that the local peasants built their homes askew, or “kose” in Czech, he wrote an article about it for the journal of the Museum of the Czech Kingdom. He was then lured to the pub in Kosmo on the pretext of giving a lecture, where the locals gave him a right royal hiding.

No sooner had the swelling on his face gone down than the incorrigible amateur researcher found a medieval parchment in the archives in which the lord of the manor, Lord Smil, granted the villagers permission to dig a well. The razor-sharp Nebejas realized that the name of the village should properly be written as Smilavoda, as in Smil’s Water, and not Smylavoda, as in Cleansing Water, as everyone had thought until then.

He even sat down at his desk and wrote a letter to the district governor’s office governorship suggesting that in the interests of historical accuracy the village should be renamed. However, no reply was forthcoming and everyone continued to misspell Smylavoda with a y. But the teacher did not give up. His research ground to a halt, he stopped shaving, his garden behind the school became overgrown with weeds and he began to spend all of his money on envelopes, ink and stamps. He sent request after request to every office imaginable, including the ministries of cultivation, railways and war, the police headquarters, the Jewish community, Emperor Franz Joseph I in Vienna and Pope Leo XIII in Rome, the university, the academy of sciences, the householders’ cooperative, the grand master of the Seven Retorts lodge of the Illuminati, and so on, but no-one paid him the slightest attention.

Nor did Peprník the mayor want to hear about any changes. The town hall would then have had to buy a new sign with the name of the village on it. And so he ordered the town crier to announce that the village had got its name from a legend about a robber knight who had been driven by unrequited love to abandon the Templar order seven hundred years earlier and had stopped at the local well to wash off the blood of his victims, hence the name Smylavoda or Cleansing Water.

When Nebejas heard this, he ran straight to the town hall.

“Mr Mayor, admit that you made that story up!” he accused him in a faltering voice.

“I made it up,” admitted the mayor without blushing, tucking his thumbs into the edge of his fancy gold brocade waistcoat with its pattern of scaly, long-eared demons from the Ace of Acorns card. Amongst other things, the mayor was a passionate devotee of the card game mariáš with its tarot-style cards.

“But in that case it isn’t a legend!” said the teacher raising his voice.

“What do you mean? Of course it is!” the mayor contradicted him. “A legend is a legend precisely because of the fact that it isn’t a fact. Logically, then, every legend must have been made up by someone. So why not me? Now be off with you, teacher. I’ve work to do here.”

The schoolmaster couldn’t think of a suitable retort, so he left, humiliated.

In despair, he gradually began to breakfast, lunch and dine on the cheapest grey liquor that the furrier and merchant Rosenblunt secretly distilled from stolen sugar beet.

In the end, Nebejas proved himself to be an inventor too by making an air balloon filled with marsh gas. He sewed it together himself from his only suit and filled it with gas from a bog known locally as the “Slain Man”. However, instead of a basket he attached a rope with which he hanged himself.

There was not a breath of wind that day and so the teacher’s naked corpse dangled above the village until firemen from the town of Bzdín arrived with a long enough ladder to pull him down.

Doctor Luftstein, who officially examined the deceased, took pity on him and wrote Smilavoda with an “i” for the place of death on his death certificate.

 

12th May 1945, 12.05pm

He went into the courtyard and his gaze fell on an unsightly, shiny grey patch on the farmhouse wall where Koza the nanny goat liked to scratch her behind on the way back from grazing. He pulled a plank away from a hole in the ground where some lime was maturing – lime which had been slaked before he was born – and filled a bucket with the wobbly white mass. While a loaf was baking in the oven, Augustin gave the whole wall a fresh coat of whitewash. After hundreds of millions of years encased in rock, the crushed shells of Paleozic molluscs reflected the sunlight once again. He cleaned his brush at the pump and the lime water seeped into the ground, leaving behind a white labyrinth in the brown courtyard.

His timing was perfect – from the oven wafted a smell so powerful you could almost touch it, signalling that the bread was just right. He opened the oven door and brought the bread out into the light with a wooden peel. Steam in the sign of the cross issued from the slit crust. As this gift of God began to cool down, it ever so quietly sang to itself.

Apolena came out of the barn with an empty cup in her hand, rinsed out the black strip of coffee and returned it to its place on the sideboard, where a shallow depression had formed over the years. Then she started to get lunch ready.

 

8th October 1899

For once his schoolmate Krajta had not been lying – their rabbit did have the heart of a dictator. Its furious biting, clawing and screeching had made a slave out of the old ram, who was many times its size, and it had then gone on to terrorize the whole farm. Even the vicious watchdog crawled into his kennel when he saw it, and the gleam would vanish from the eyes of the one-ton bull called Satan under its rheumy stare. The rabbit took a special liking to the ram’s warm, soft, fleece-covered back. Sprawling there like a lord, he let it carry him around his rabbit kingdom and slept on it at night.

Soon the rabbit cast its demonic spell over the farmer and his entire family. For this was no ordinary rabbit but a pure-bred Belgian Giant, a champion breed, bought by Krajta’s father in distant Prague at an exhibition by the Central Union of Czechoslovak Rabbit Breeders, and it had been hellishly expensive, so they couldn’t kill it. However, the rabbit made the mistake that all those who are too powerful make: it believed nothing could happen to it and let its guard down, and that was to cost it its neck.

It met its doom when a band of travellers came roaming across the sleeping village of Smylavoda. Here some hens disappeared from a coop, there a pot of pears went missing from a cellar. And even though in the morning the peasants who had been robbed called the thieves every name under the sun, everyone accepted it as the way things were and part of folklore. After all, if Gypsies had to work, then who would play the cimbalom and the tambourine until their souls danced out of their bodies? Who would tell fortunes from the lines in your palm or from coffee grounds?

That autumn night, the Krajta’s evil rabbit was resting on its laurels and awoke on a bay leaf in the Gypsy camp. Everyone was so relieved that the following day old Krajta sent the Gypsies via the local policeman a bottle of Augustin’s new liquor – candy schnapps.

The Hnát family, in contrast to this, had only nice, peaceable rabbits. Every morning Augustin would lovingly chop up some juicy young nettles and couch grass for them and then watch as they busily munched away.

The Krajta family looked down on rabbit meat and at most would use it minced to bulk out the pork meatloaf for the farmhands so that it would go further. The Hnáts, on the other hand, loved rabbit cooked in every possible way.

Every Sunday, Grandma Rozálie would choose the plumpest male, lift him up by the ears and tell him as usual: “Everything repeats itself and people never learn from it”, and then with one sharp flick of the edge of her wrinkled palm brought his soft existence to an end.

After that Granddad Vavřinec took charge of the rabbit. He slit it open and left it to bleed, hung it by its hind legs from the planks of the fence and gutted it with one clean cut. He kept only the liver, heart and kidneys for food; the blood and the rest of the innards went into an old pot for the flies to feast upon. After a few days the pot would begin to writhe with hatched larvae which were used as a nutritious snack for the roosters – although they were actually hens, in Smylavoda they were all called roosters.

He then pulled off the rabbit skin and left it hanging from the fence for the furrier to see. Once a week, on Wednesdays, Samuel Rosenblut would go around the village to collect them in a goat-drawn cart. All bedecked in rabbit skins, he resembled a furry tree, and he rang a bell, bleated at the goat and called out in both Yiddish and Czech: “Koyfn – pelts! Folks – furs!” He would expertly rub the skins between his fingers and stroke his cheek with them voluptuously. He would perform his ritual of haggling for a while before offering a good price – the Hnáts’ rabbits had wonderfully soft fur which was as black as an August night, ideal for making top-quality felt for rabbis’ hats.

The tender rabbit meat was then cooked in seven different alternating ways: in a creamy vegetable sauce, in garlic, in a rosehip sauce, with dried plums, in rosemary, with mushrooms, or – best of all –with onions.

You take the rabbit’s head and heart, thus ending the conflict between reason and emotion, and use them to make a stock as strong as a stockade. Finely chop half a dozen onions and fry them in rendered bacon until golden. Then let the hot onions enfold the rabbit, sprinkled with salt and cut into six pieces, in their loving embrace. Sear the meat and then add a bay leaf, thyme and pepper. Pour in the hot broth and simmer until tender. Transfer the meat to the pot, sieve the onion and the juices, and then pour the resulting sauce over the meat and cook it all together for a while with the lid on. You’ll know it’s ready when the rabbit begins to smell unbearably good. Then sauté the kidneys and the sliced liver and return them to the rabbit on the plate – which, fortunately, will not be enough to revive it.

What Augustin loved best out of the whole rabbit was the nice crust on the ribs with its lining of tender fat. But he never told anyone, because if he had, his older brother Libor would have eaten it on purpose, even if he didn’t like it. The only family member who knew his secret was Granddad Vavřinec, and he would always give Augustin a forkful of the best pieces from his own plate.

And just as the family was polishing off the small bones from the onion sauce, Zmok the town crier came out onto the square to announce that after Sunday mass they would be choosing the cabbage treaders.

Smylavoda’s pickled cabbage was famed far and wide and was much in demand – just like Pilsner beer, brandy from Cognac, Iberian ham from the Pedroches Valley or marzipan from Lubeck. Not only was the local cabbage more tender and juicy than anywhere else, it was also distinguished by the wonderfully subtle flavour that it got from the addition of grated horseradish, mustard seeds, apple and caraway, which grew on the other side of the cemetery wall, where suicides were buried. What really made it special, however, was it gained most in its flavour from the lactic fermentation in the bowels of a huge earthenware vat known as the cabbager, which occupied most of the cellar underneath the town hall. These days no-one could remember who had built this monster and, more importantly, how they had managed to get it into the cellar, as the only access was through a corridor much narrower than the cabbager.

One theory suggested that the barrel had been broken into pieces, taken to the cellar and then put back together again. However, this was refuted by the fact that no cracks were to be found on the cabbager. Another hypothesis was that the cabbager had first been formed out of clay and then fired inside the cellar itself. However, most of the villagers believed the old tale that the cabbager had been brought there long ago by giants who pickled people in it. It was only later that the town hall had been built on top of it.

Wherever the truth lay, the people of Smylavoda had kept their gigantic cabbager a secret. They didn’t even know about it in neighbouring Kosmo, while Kadlub the parish priest had only the slightest inkling.

The whole village lived for pickled cabbage. Since time immemorial the cabbage ritual had had its unchanging order and traditions, which everyone scrupulously observed. Each year in the autumn, as soon as the cabbage was ripe in the fields, they chose two “treaders” – the boy and girl with the most beautiful feet. Everyone shredded the heads of cabbage themselves and brought it to the cabbager, where the town crier weighed the cabbage and issued a certificate for it. The treaders then walked on the shredded cabbage all night until they had treaded all the air out of it. After six weeks the cabbage was ready and everyone could load their share into a normal fermentation crock and take it home.

It was a great honour to be a treader, and you also received a bonus in the form of the stalks from all of the shredded heads. That was why for years now Augustin had been treating his legs with a decoction of marigold and rich mud from the local swamp “The Slain Man”. So now he couldn’t wait until Sunday, when the decision was to be made.

No sooner had the organ finished playing in the new church with the miniature nave and oversized tower than the young people from the entire village assembled in front of the town cabbager. Peprník the mayor and Stojespal the blacksmith then inspected, sniffed and even licked everyone’s feet, and after much deliberation chose Augustin Hnát and Lenka Číšecká.

They scrubbed both children’s feet with river sand and soap, and then steamed them over a pot of boiling water until they turned red. With the aid of a pulley and rope they were hoisted to the top of the cabbager, where they jumped down onto the pile of shreddings. The strips of cabbage cushioned their fall better than a plump duvet.

They stood face to face with their hands on each other’s waists. Then they began to dance inside the vat to the music of their young hearts, which began to beat to the same rhythm. Inhaling the intoxicatingly pungent fumes from the cabbage sap sent them into a blissful trance, and the lumps of cabbage squeezed erotically through the spaces between their toes.

At first he tried to look down at the cabbage, but Lenka’s big eyes, the colour of morning grass, soon drew him towards them, and Augustin drowned in them for so long that he submitted to death and was reborn in the knowledge that she and she alone was the one for him, the woman of his life, destined to be his until the end of all days and nights.

His heart pounded, the cabbage squelched, and her firm hips burned his hands, but he felt no tiredness or pain, and he would gladly have danced and danced with her until he fell down from exhaustion.

Towards morning the air bubbles stopped rising from the shreddings. When they finally hauled them out from the cabbager onto dry land, Augustin and Lenka already had one foot in the land of nod. And even after they had been washed and put to bed, they continued to tread invisible cabbage in their sleep.

 

12th May 1945, 1.03pm

Apolena called to him from the kitchen range to bring some cabbage. He went down into the cellar, lifted the lid of the fermentation crock out of the water-filled groove and shook off the drops. Then he placed it on his head like an earthenware hat to free up his hands and ladled small clumps of cabbage into a bowl. Because the lid was quite large, he had to balance it carefully on the top of his head. When the bowl was full, he turned the ladle on its side and let the cloudy liquid run down it. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back and with slow sips revelled in the sweet-and-sour flavour of the juice.

Its sensuous bouquet conjured up memories which he quickly pushed aside. That night when he fell in love with her would never return. The two most important ingredients were now missing, never to be found again – Lenka was dead and the cabbager had been blown to pieces by the Germans.

He took the lid off his head and put it back in its place.

Their meagre wartime lunch consisted of celeriac cutlets with potato and cabbage mash. It was difficult to find it among the celeriac, but he managed to do so and gave his daughter the best pieces from his own plate.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Zuzana Brabcová

Aviaries
Voliéry

(Druhé město, 128 pages)

Aviaries is a posthumously published text from the recently deceased author of one of the first Czech novels to openly describe lesbian relations, Year of Pearls, which has been translated into many languages. Aviaries is an intimate diary account of neurotically oversensitive perception of the world around us. As in her previous works, here too Brabcová works bewitchingly with the language, pulsating from bare recording to supreme metaphors, from lyrical tropes to vulgarity, revealing motifs of being alone and lost in a world that has ceased to make sense. The everyday entries shift to more general and symbolic testimonies. They do not philosophize but cause shock by revealing the grotesque – as if the present generated nothing but black humour, the bizarre, the pompous and the void. The pilgrim has examined the world and now has nowhere to go. There is no longer any paradise of the heart, her own interior world… Brabcová is a Magnesia Litera Award winner and the first ever Jiří Orten Award winner. Aviaries won the Josef Škvorecký Award, has been nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award and an English translation of the novel will be published by Twisted Spoon Press.

Praise

“This sophisticated testimony of social exclusion oscillates between the diary genre, dream entries and fantasy prose.”

— Petr Bílek, Literární noviny

“[Aviaries has] a rich style, figurative language, a combination of absolute introspection and reflections on external situations”

— Josef Chuchma, Lidové noviny

Links

Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: druhemesto.cz

Excerpt ▼

20th December 2011

It comes on around four or five in the afternoon, sets in around seven and then takes over for the night. It’s been like that for years – I can’t remember it ever being any different. A day devoted to not going out is a musical score for a melody that nobody has ever played. And if I have to go out all the same, then the people that I pass by have a bloom, a glassy frosting that makes their outlines appear fuzzy; I can imagine they do not exist, and so love them. All that exists merely spoils and disturbs, as if somebody had sprayed over The Night Watch.

The day before yesterday Václav Havel died. In his sleep, in the morning hours. So it does not just take over at night.


21st December 2011

“Gosh, did I cry! I really liked him!” said the woman I bought Nový prostor magazine from at Anděl.

It was around freezing point and she had no gloves. All day long it had been around freezing point and all day she had no gloves. All day long she shuffled up and down by the bus stop.

“Why don’t you have any gloves?”

“They’re expensive,” she replied.

Her top and and bottom teeth were also missing.

They are even more expensive.

I went round the corner to the Christmas market and bought her some gloves. The little round emptiness of her face lit up, while my revulsion over my own gestures contorted me and she clenched the throat of Christmas with them.

22nd December 2011

That bloom is not only on people but also on things, while between me and them looms a mirror rampart, built into the frame at right angles. Smelling of incense, the whole shop tinkles.

I would stand behind the curtain and observe for hours and hours as Míra and Bobeš dribble the ball, a static image in motion, but I do not have a curtain.

I wipe off the dust and look at the dictionary: “Microscopic particles of matter of mineral or organic origin created by a rubbing-off process and settling as dirt.”

Something’s the matter. Something is up. Something isn’t right.

(Translated by Melvyn Clarke)

Zuzana Kultánová

Augustin Zimmermann

(Kniha Zlín, 200 pages)

Although this is Kultánová’s debut novel, the response from critics and readers has been overwhelmingly positive, earning the author a nomination in the Magnesia Litera Award’s Discovery of the Year category. Augustin Zimmermann, the main protagonist of this book which takes place in the 1860s, represents an almost archetypal model of an unhappy person. While the world around him is productive and prosperous during the Industrial Revolution, his family is struggling with an existential crisis exacerbated by his alcoholism and hopeless attempts to succeed in this new world. Augustin’s uncertain past, strange unease and deceitful nature cast a dark shadow on his entire family, which is spiralling into increasing despair and falling to the bottom of the social hierarchy from which there is no escape. The story culminates tragically in Prague’s Josefov quarter, a place of misery, which for centuries was a Jewish ghetto. This is a dark novel inspired by true events, nevertheless it also contains moments of humour. Pitch black humour.

Praise

“Augustin Zimmermann is an exceedingly good debut novella […] The author’s diverse style is full of naturalism and a number of imaginative analogies, yet it retains its clarity.”

— Petr Nagy, Host 8/2016

“An exceptional and uncompromising novel.”

— Aleš Palán, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Publisher: www.knihazlin.cz

Excerpt ▼

It was after lunch on a Sunday when Augustin Zimmermann rose to leave, his rickety chair clattering in the process. His wife asked him where he was off to this time and where he had got the money for booze. By way of reply Zimmerman, a tall man with piercing blue eyes, merely spat out some abuse. “Why are you always fucking going on at me?!” He opened the door and headed out into the Sunday afternoon, muttering something about an old bitch.

It was after lunch on a Sunday when Augustin Zimmermann rose to leave, his rickety chair clattering in the process. His wife asked him where he was off to this time and where he had got the money for booze. By way of reply Zimmerman, a tall man with piercing blue eyes, merely spat out some abuse. “Why are you always fucking going on at me?!” He opened the door and headed out into the Sunday afternoon, muttering something about an old bitch.

The old bitch followed his retreating figure with a sigh. It would be a waste of words, which would run through him like water through a cleaned-out fish head. She placed her veined arms on her lap, then something snapped inside her and she threw an earthenware mug at the door. With an annoyingly loud noise it smashed into several pieces. For a few minutes there was silence. The woman stared into space for a while before getting up to collect the shards, which made a tinkling sound as they spread across the floor like mercury. It was the last decent cup they’d had. She threw the remains of the cup onto the street; they could end up killing someone for all she cared.

Her husband, Augustin Zimmermann, walked along the street in the direction of the pub, though he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. He loosened his red scarf and for a moment toyed with the idea of going home to his wife, having a chat with the neighbours, letting the day go by, giving the kids a thrashing for good measure and going to work sober in the morning. He felt a strong desire for harmony, a lazy afternoon and a drawn-out Sunday. But how? At home? With his wife? With his neighbours? Or even in the pub? For a moment he thought he could hear festive music being played – the annoying creaking of a barrel-organ and the rattling of a tired old accordion. It all sounded very distant and inhuman. As distant as this day.

It’s this damned thirst, you can’t help it, he said to himself. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so rough on Františka, but he couldn’t control himself. It was always money, money, money. She constantly went on at him about money and drink – as if he didn’t have enough to deal with already. Alone – he was alone in the world. He would sit by himself today. He had a feeling that the drink wasn’t going to improve his mood, that he wouldn’t join in with the carefree singing or bang his glass on the table. Today he would get darkly, grimly drunk. This Sunday owed him something. The whole world, which was constantly making promises, owed him something, and with interest. But no payment or special rate of interest were forthcoming. They were certainly taking their time about it. Instead his life was a succession of blows. Drudgery and a shortage of everything. Where was the joy in it, why was there none left over for Augustin? And why was there none left for his wife, whose ribs stuck out from under her blouse like a rake from straw?

Augustin kept expecting the world to come rushing up with a sack full of joy and, as if by magic, arrange for he and his missus to have a better life. If only that sack existed, he would be able to find at least an ounce of joy for his eternally sour-faced wife. His wife, for whom nothing was good enough, for whom nothing was sacred, his wife who had no respect for her husband and merely ridiculed him. But the sack was empty and full of holes. And where would the world get this sack of plenty from and why would it give it to him of all people? his wife would laugh at him if she could see into his head. What makes you think that you could be a success? she would ask. Just be glad that you’re still alive.

A sharp stab of indignation passed through Zimmerman. He was struck by a sense of injustice and his head was filled with dark thoughts. He kicked a stone, passed by some people, doffed his cap and loosened his scarf until it fell to the ground. Cursing, he picked it up and put it back on. He’d just as happily hang himself with it. He looked at the woman in front of him – she had broad hips and a fat behind. She waddled like a duck – like a miller’s wife he had once known. Prudent and cautious with money. Expansive, as though you were standing alone in a meadow.

But one day all of her nice chubby flesh was crushed by a mill wheel. During one unfortunate storm she was mercilessly swept between its blades, which tossed her around as though she was not a beautiful, fat, pink human body, but a pile of manure. No-one was able to stop the relentless motion of the wheel. It turned and turned, crushing the body of the plump miller’s wife to a pulp.

It took three pairs of strong arms to extricate the waterlogged body of the miller’s wife and the body of her son, who had jumped in after her. When they pulled them out, they averted their eyes. It was a horrendous sight. Where was the beautiful miller’s wife with the wide hips? Why was there this sack, drenched in water, without beauty or form? Fat millers’ wives should die tucked under their quilts, attended to by distraught relatives and well-wishers, surrounded by daisies and bladdernut rosaries, bathed in sunlight, glory and eternity. Their bodies should ascend to the heavens in a dignified manner with a divine smile. They had no business resembling a rotten, mouldy potato sack, or some poor wretch who’d popped their clogs in the middle of a damp cottage. They dragged her into an outhouse and the abating water, which just moments before had been casting up a furious foam, washed the stones of the river clean of guilt.

It silently wept and regretted. It couldn’t help it. Once in a while the storm would take hold of it and destroy whatever it could until it had worked off its anger, until it had reached such a peak of fury that it could rest again for a few years in the aftermath of its convulsions. One brief, powerful summer storm was all it took to cause the accident which broke the miller’s wife’s neck, the miller’s spirit and all of their son’s limbs. Zimmerman then travelled the countryside telling people of the accident. They wanted to know the details. They wanted to know if the wheel had really pulverized everything.

Zimmerman didn’t know exactly what had happened before the jaws of the water had swallowed her up. How did she get so close to the wheel? She had always been careful, and the children had been forbidden from going within several metres of it. She had sometimes argued about it with her husband, who reproached her for keeping the children away from their trade. The miller’s wife ruled the mill with a firm hand, but she was afraid of it. It is so big, so much bigger than me, she thought as she looked at the large, noisy structure. Water can kill as well as heal, she used to say. It awaits your fear like an alert dog.

The tall, blue-eyed man finally reached the pub. The first thing he did was order a caraway schnapps. Then a beer, a schnapps, a beer, a schnapps. He sat alone, staring at the crowd. The gaudy outfits of the spruced-up workers danced in front of his eyes. The clothes sparkled across the whole pub like glass stones from a fair, and everyone acted as though they were not made of cheap and nasty material. They wanted to give the impression that they were beautiful clothes designed for festive occasions full of hope. The female workers would find themselves male workers, with whom they would lead a miserable, squalid life filled with the hooting of factory chimneys, quarrels and the screaming of hungry children. What wonderful prospects awaited these poor women stuffed into their tawdry outfits, dancing to tired old ditties full of double entendres.

# Just you wait, Marie. Pepík, what for? #

They came here to choose for themselves a rather ragged young man, who would one day be the death of them, but even so it was worth it. To put on a dress, dance, drink and fornicate while you could still pretend that life still might turn out to be one big holiday.

# Just you wait, Marie. Pepík, what for? #

The hurdy-gurdy ground away and the young men shouted over one another, running about the pub like wild dogs, eagerly baring their teeth, clinking bottles, clutching one another. Augustin lost himself in the clamour and drank himself into oblivion. He sat alone. He had no-one to sit with and no-one wanted to sit with him. He wasn’t good company. He went from laughter to swearing and from swearing to laughter – it didn’t make for a great sense of camaraderie. And so he sat alone, staring at the bottle and trying not to sober up. He couldn’t take that kind of pain. A new week lay ahead and he had to make sure he was ready for it. A mild drunkenness would still be with him tomorrow, then he’d sober up, and he’d hold out for a while, but just so that the pain didn’t destroy him, and then he’d be back here again. Františka understood – she was a sensible woman who knew she couldn’t expect anything better from him anyway. A week is so unpredictable. You couldn’t even tell how long a week was going to be. When he had finally drunk away all his money, he paid up with a sense of relief and stumbled out into the street, but being so tall he banged his head against the doorframe on the way out. Cursing, he almost fell over. For a moment his arms waved slowly in the air before he regained his balance.

Trudging through the dark streets, he passed the elegant silhouettes of factory chimneys. They looked like those posh cigarettes wrapped in very thin paper, which Zimmerman would certainly never smoke. The strictly right-angled, classicist streets of the Karlín district undulated and merged into one another. For a moment Augustin really had no idea where he was. He pricked up his ears, but in vain. The roads were suspiciously expansive and yet closed-off at the same time. He found himself in a labyrinth with no exit, full of dead ends and false trails, each of which closed at precisely the moment you wanted to get out. A labyrinth full of dark forests whose thorns pricked his nerves. A moth flew around his head while from somewhere came the scratching of rats. For a moment it seemed to him that he could hear the murmur of the harbour, but it was too far from him. He drove away the idea that he was moving upon water and rummaged around in his pockets for his pipe. He had to have a smoke. This wasn’t normal. He drew in the stink of the cheap tobacco and his stomach heaved. Didn’t a train just go by this way? Leaning against a wall, he stopped and stared into the darkness. His head was splitting and he felt a severe pain just above his eye. He should have stayed in the pub. At least it was safe there. Karlín was far too expansive – it made you nervous, made you hear strange things.

His knees began to buckle under him and he felt very tired. He would have preferred to lie down somewhere and sleep, but then there would be a big fuss if someone saw him there in the morning. Františka would fly into a rage. “Children, just look at your father sleeping in the street like a pig.” He could do without having to listen to that.

He could have done with a drink – his mouth was burning like the fires of hell. Like the blazing furnaces of those awful buildings with their tall, thin, black chimneys constantly belching out smoke. At last he stood in front of his house. The windows were stuffed with rags to keep out the draughts, and in the courtyard the hens slept, bloated like footballs. A hovel which it was better to enter in the darkness. A cursed, rented home. He took hold of the handle and tripped over a bucket. He cursed, wondering who had done it. He decided that his wife must have left the bucket there as a trap for him. She wanted to make a cripple of him – she’d like that. He rattled the handle a few times and when he found that it was open he barged inside. He scooped some water in his cupped hands, slurped it down, undid his scarf and fell onto the mattress.

“Don’t pretend you’re sleeping,” he yelled into the darkness. He needed some respect. He was a working man and a father, and his wife was lying around when she should have been working, and his children were sleeping when they should have been helping.

No-one said anything. Any response would set him off and Františka had to work the next day. As well as making buttons, she was now mending clothes as well and had to work hard. If she replied, her husband would flare up and kick up a fuss until morning. That was what he wanted to do – to let off steam. Not even the hours spent drinking could quench his anger. Augustin sat for a while, rolling his fuzzy tongue around in his mouth, thoughts swirling around in his head, narrowing his eyes like a cat. His pupils darted restlessly this way and that, trying to catch hold of something. Even he didn’t know what, and yet he was sure of what it ought to be. Eventually tiredness overcame him and his stomach also started to bother him. He lay down and started to hiccup. This disturbed everyone. The children clenched their fists, closed their eyes as tightly as they could and tried to sleep. The cold floor was like a stab in the kidneys. The room began to fill with the stench of drunkenness and the drunk’s wife saw red. She bit her hand. Finally, however, after about half an hour, God had mercy on them and Augustin hiccupped for the last time before starting to snore. Meanwhile, the gently rolling hills enfolded Karlín, blowing onto the burning wounds of the endless night.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Marek Toman

The Praise of Opportunism
Chvála oportunismu

(Torst, 420 pages)

Marek Toman is an experienced author and journalist, whose books have been published in English, Finnish, Polish and Hungarian. In his latest novel, Toman has found a truly original voice for the retelling of modern Czech and Central European history: the testimony of the Černín Palace that has been witness to many historical, military, political, and personal events. The author has made the largest Baroque structure in Prague the protagonist, commenting upon the historical events that have passed it by over the centuries. Narrating its own story, the palace describes the turning points in Czech history, from the day it was built up until the present day. Over time, the palace has served as a gallery, a hospital, military barracks, a shelter for the poor, or office of the Reichsprotektor during the Second World War.

Praise

“[…] exceptionally convincing, at the same time thrilling and emotionally charged. Thanks to the truly original form through which The Praise of Opportunism manages to capture the passing of history, the novel bears comparison with the best works of current European fiction: Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, Hilary Mantel’s Tudor saga, or The Great Century by Swedish writer Jan Guillou.”

— Zdenko Pavelka, Právo

“This novel about one of the most remarkable buildings in Prague has an unusually powerful narrative drive and a comic flair.”

— Markéta Pilátová, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: www.torst.cz

Marek Šindelka

Material Fatigue
Únava materiálu

(Odeon, 208 pages)

Material Fatigue is the first novel by a Czech author to address the European migrant crisis. Šindelka is an award-winning young writer whose books are popular with readers both in the Czech Republic and abroad, having been published in Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian and Hungarian. The hero of this book is an unnamed teenage boy who finds himself in a foreign country in the middle of Europe, which in his eyes looks like nothing more than a complex of fences, overpasses, railway corridors and warehouses. Travelling through the cold winter landscape, he is denied real life, moving like a shadow on the periphery of the country and society. He is trying to get to a city in the north where he had been heading with his older brother Aamir, before they were split up by people smugglers. Although the novel is based on the current migration crisis, it explores universal themes of alienation, the loss of one’s home and roots. Šindelka depicts the reduction of the lives of ‘foreigners’, artificially created enemies, to a problem, manpower, material. Material Fatigue has been nominated for the EU Prize for Literature and the Magnesia Litera Award.

Praise

“Šindelka’s prose is strongest in its descriptions of the physical experiences of the refugees. Animal instincts seem to awaken in the main characters when their lives are threatened. Some of the insights are extremely powerful.”

— Daniel Konrád, Hospodářské noviny

“[Šindelka] is able to convey the movement of every muscle, twitching nerves as well as the effects of the elements: snow, wind, ice or clouds and their fluctuations which are indifferent to humans. These parts have an almost existential dimension.”

— Josef Chuchma, Lidové noviny 3/1/2017

“Šindelka’s book is profoundly lyrical.”

— Veronika Dvorská, A2 3/17

Links

Author website: mareksindelka.wordpress.com
Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: odeon-knihy.cz

Emil Hakl

Uma’s Version
Umina verze

(Argo, 208 pages)

Hakl is a Czech literary celebrity, best known for his novel Of Kids and Parents, which has also been turned into a successful film. His books have been translated into many languages, including English, German and Dutch. Hakl’s latest novel addresses a hot topic in science and technology — the creation of an artificial human. In Uma’s Version, humanity’s Frankenstein-like desire to create a humanoid robot is fulfilled in genuinely amateur conditions. However, this does not prevent the two main characters from experiencing an intense relationship based on mutual affection, which eventually turns into an addiction, conspiratorial friendship and sex. This is a novel about love with a plot which incorporates detective novel elements and is written in the authors typically efficient and fast-paced style.

Praise

“Hakl chose a brilliant topic for this book. Questions about how we will coexist with robots, humanoids and other technological creations are appealing for everyone.”

— Monika Zavřelová, MF Dnes

“The beginning of [Uma’s Version] has atmosphere and a fast pace. […] It will be easy for readers to quickly get through Uma’s Version, it won’t be a problem to read the book in two evenings, maybe even just one.”

— Jarda Konáš, Aktuálně.cz

Links

Author website: www.emilhakl.cz
Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: www.argo.cz

Cover image: An illustration by Martin Salajka from The Lake (Host, 2016).

For our final feature on the best books of 2015 (after literary fiction and children’s books), we have selected our favourite Czech sci-fi, fantasy, crime novels and thrillers. Some of the best-known Czech writers, including Kafka and Čapek, incorporated genre elements in their work, yet quality Czech genre fiction is now often overlooked abroad. We hope our selection of titles will help translators and publishers navigate the vast amount of popular Czech genre literature and that this will lead to more of these books reaching an international audience in the coming years.

Contents

Sci-fi/Fantasy

Miloš Urban: Urbo Kune

Martin Vopěnka: New Planet

Karel Jerie: Candide, Book Two — The Grand Inquisitor

Jan Šumbera: Headworld — By the Curious Pilgrim

Detective/Crime

Iva Procházková: The Zodiac Murders / Man at the Bottom

Štěpán Kopřiva: Quick-fire

Zdenka Hamerová: The Secret of Klejinka

Jiří Březina: Time-barred

Thriller

Pavel Renčín: Captive

Miloš Urban

Urbo Kune

(Argo, 372 pages)

Miloš Urban is one of the most famous Czech authors, whose translations have been published in many languages including English, German, Polish and Italian. He is especially popular in Spanish-speaking countries, where his books sell tens of thousands of copies. Winner of the Magnesia Litera award for prose, he is best known for his dark and atmospheric detective novels. In his latest book, Urban has applied his skills to the sci-fi genre. Mikuláš Jelen, a librarian, leaves his antique shop in Prague and travels to the capital city of Euroworld, Urbo, for a new job. However, he finds it hard to adapt to Urbo and has a growing feeling that the city lives its own secret life, hidden from society and the state. He can only hope that he will come to understand his role in the secret plan of the city before someone kills him. Part of a unique project of the same name which includes architecture, literature, film, art and music, Urban’s novel uses the sci-fi genre to address contemporary problems facing Europe.

Praise

“Although Urbo Kune is a sci-fi novel, it very clearly reflects the present day, and includes such pressing themes as mass migration and the influence of the internet on culture […] It is a novel filled with imagination, word play and anagrams, but also facts from various subject areas.”

— Jiří Lojín, VašeLiteratura

“There is no shortage of Urban’s characteristic mystery in Urbo Kune.”

— Dagmar Čechová, Blesk

Links

Author website: www.milos-urban.cz
Publisher: www.argo.cz

Excerpt ▼

Chapter 1.

“Mr Jelen? Hello. I’m Kratochvíl.”

“Hello.”

“You are Mr Jelen, aren’t you?”

“Mikuláš Jelen. Did Roman Rott send you? Or did Untermesser recommend me? What are you looking for?”

He laughed, shaking his head. “You don’t recognize me.”

“Should I recognize you?”

“Kratochvíl.”

“Sorry. I don’t know who you are, Mr Kratochvíl. Are you here for a book?”

“No, I’m not. We were at school together, remember? The elementary school in Schnirchova Street below Letná.”

“I don’t remember. Wait a minute… Boris? Your full name is Boris Kratochvíl, isn’t it?”

“We ought to call each other by our first names, Mikuláš, like we used to do. I can hardly believe that you wouldn’t recognize a classmate. Or are you just putting it on because you don’t want to recognize me?”

Thus spoke the man who walked into my shop at an exceptionally early hour: at seventeen minutes past nine, i.e. seventeen minutes after opening. Normal people don’t usually come in before midday.

What he had said was plain rude. Either you recognize me or you’re pretending. Nothing in between. How objectionable.

Yes, he did look familiar, now that I thought about it. The broad face of the ginger-haired, thickset boy who had gone around dressed like a petty official even when he was a child. It was still there in him. My classmate Boris.

“Sorry. It was a long time ago. I recognize you now.”

He looked at me, and I looked at him. It was awkward; I had always avoided encounters with former classmates, whom chance makes our fellow wayfarers in life for a short time; I kept myself to myself, independent of them. And so I made use of this rare opportunity and looked at myself through his eyes: inconspicuous even then (apart from the hand), a man of few means, a bachelor or a divorcé even then – that had already been written in his hand or his face at the age of ten. Now he’s about thirty-six. Zero to two children, maybe one child to support – with those nervous-looking eyes, he obviously didn’t intend to talk about that. He had opened a second-hand bookshop from a love of books, and before that he did this and that.

Career more or less non-existent.

Or did he know more about me?

“Hi, Boris.” I shook his hand. How long was it since I’d seen him? Twenty-five years? After a year of suffering in one class, fourth or fifth grade, he had moved away somewhere. I hated school. It was full of loud little people, all of them strangers. There were adult strangers there too, equally uncomprehending. Young or old, all of them looked at my hand when I went up to the blackboard.

“I imagine you’re looking for something,” I said. “I’d guess some erotica from the First Republic. Pictures or writing? Probably pictures, eh? I don’t have anything very interesting in stock, but I’ll make a note and ask around. Give me a month and I can get you anything you want. It also depends how much you’re willing to pay. Anything else?”

I found myself acting haughtily before I could stop myself.

“I’m not looking for a book, Mikuláš. I’m looking for you.”

“Really? Who told you about me?”

He made a face. “Nobody. You can find everything on the internet.”

“I don’t have a website,” I objected. Which was true. I refused to pay for that kind of publicity either in money or by accepting adverts. He smiled (a little too indulgently for my liking; he was putting on an act).

“Some people praised this little business of yours.”

“It isn’t a ‘little business’,” I protested, and Kratochvíl become more serious.

“Of course not, I’m sorry. Your second-hand bookshop has been in operation for quite a while, hasn’t it? A well-established business. It has excellent reviews. Don’t you read about it on the Net?”

“You guessed it.” (But the truth was that I enjoyed reading something positive about myself from time to time. I completely ignored negative reviews though, as soon as I came across a few critical words.) “But surely you didn’t look me up just to tell me that I run a good second-hand bookshop?”

“Maybe I did. You used to work in publishing.”

“That’s right,” I nodded.

“And you were also in the town library. For about three years?”

“Five years,” I admitted.

“Ordinary work, badly paid, lots of reading. Is anyone interested in this?”

“Always books,” he laughed, looking around at the shelves.

“That’s a good motto,” I said dryly. He stopped smiling.

“I came to tell you, Mikuláš, that I have a job for you. I’m offering you it.”

“I have a second-hand bookshop. That’s what I’m doing now. I don’t need a job. I’ve worked enough in my life.”

“It’s like you’re in retirement here,” he grimaced. “You’re thirty-five years old.”

“That’s nobody’s business but mine,” I snapped. I had been through enough. But I didn’t say that out loud. That was nobody’s business either. With his gaze fixed on the shelf marked CZECH FICTION, he mumbled that with the rent they wanted for this place I wouldn’t last long; a second-hand bookshop near the centre of Prague which didn’t focus on Pragensia, expensive fine-press publications and rare early printed books couldn’t stay in business for long. Then he named the amount which I pay the owner of the building each month.

The worst thing was that he was right. I could keep the shop going for another quarter of a year, but that was it. I was struggling to keep up with payments and a Russian had designs on the shop – he wanted to brew tea in a samovar and offer his compatriots the largest selection of second-hand books in Cyrillic script. From my selection of signs I chose one marked “taking delivery of books” and hung it on the glass door. People on the pavement passed by the shop window without even noticing. Above the shop I had a little room where I could rest, which was reached by a narrow spiral staircase. I invited Boris Kratochvíl upstairs and made coffee for him. I waited to see what he would say to me. And he launched into it and didn’t stop talking for a whole hour. This man, whom chance had once made my classmate and who had then disappeared from my life, had turned up here out of the blue and enthusiastically held forth about a phenomenal project which I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with but until then hadn’t had any reason to take an interest in. It concerned a stone quarry near Prague, which at one time had been much talked about on television and written about in the newspapers – it was a big political issue. “Quarry brings new hope,” said the enthusiasts. “Hopes killed stone dead,” said the sceptics. It was a long time since it had been a quarry. A hi-tech housing development had been built there – cityhouse, it was called, or something like that. A social/urbanistic/political centre away from the centre of Prague and the Czech Republic, paradoxically belonging to the somewhat rural Prague district of Zbraslav but living entirely, and incomprehensibly, on its own terms, or rather according to the rules that were postulated by its founder, Zikmund Kůn. The fact that he got away with it cost about ten local and national politicians their head. Whether it also cost Kůn a good deal of money, nobody was able to pin anything on him. They didn’t manage it in time.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Martin Vopěnka

New Planet
Nová Planeta

(Mladá fronta, 624 pages)

Martin Vopěnka, whose books are often a combination of genre and literary fiction, is currently experiencing a very successful creative period. His previous sci-fi novel, The Fifth Dimension, was recently published in English and has received praise in both the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. Vopěnka’s novels have also been translated into Russian, Arabic and Romanian. He studied nuclear physics, but since the 1990s has made his living as a publisher and writer. In his latest novel, Vopěnka focuses on societal inequality. The main character, twelve-year-old Daniel, grows up in a technically advanced but completely isolated civilisation, which is called New Planet. This dehumanised society is divided into the privileged and the unprivileged. The former pretend to have left Earth, but in reality they have only built an impenetrable wall around themselves. The privileged Daniel loves his three step-brothers without knowing they hate him. Due to their betrayal, one day he finds himself lying on a heap of corpses on the other side of the wall. There is no way back, so he has to fight for survival in the underdeveloped world outside. Soon he discovers the terrifying foundations the civilisation of the New Planet has been built on.

Praise

“New Planet is a remarkable bestiary of cruelty.”

— Petr A. Bílek, Respekt

“There are many novels about a desolate earth in world sci-fi. Vopěnka’s novel is valuable mainly because it forces us to ask questions. To what extent does a privileged group of people have the right to create a new world for themselves at the expense of billions of people from the old one?”

— Alena Slezáková, MF Dnes

Links

Author website: www.martinvopenka.cz
Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: www.mf.cz

An excerpt can be found here.

Karel Jerie

Candide, Book Two — The Grand Inquisitor
Candide, Kniha druhá – Velký inkvizitor

(BB art, 64 pages)

Karel Jerie is a cult figure in the Czech comic book scene. A classically trained painter, Jerie won first prize in the professionals category at the Polish International Festival of Comics and Games in Łódź and deserves the same attention that, for example, Jaromír 99, another legend of the Czech scene, receives abroad. In the Candide series, Jerie transforms Voltaire’s famous 18th century satire into a baroque-steampunk-space opera. In 2014, the first volume of the planned trilogy won two Muriel awards, the most prestigious Czech comic book awards. In the second book, the war-weary and disillusioned Candide reunites with Professor Pangloss who gives him a dose of bitter reality. An encounter with growers of fine cannabis in Neederland leads Candide onto a merchant ship which, however, crashes off the coast of Port Ugal. Once back on dry land, our hero has to deal with far more treacherous dangers — the ever-present bliss of the Grand Inquisitor, gallows and revolution…

Praise

“Karel Jerie continues the wild story of the first volume. Everything is excessive, overstretched, crazy, but also very enjoyable and cleverly connected with the original book by Voltaire. Jerie’s new book has a steampunk heartbeat in which the historical and futuristic are masterfully combined.”

— Stanislav Šulc, E15

“Both volumes of Candide prove that Jerie is an artist who is imaginative, playful — and mature. Many of his grimacing monsters — human or otherwise — will remain in the reader’s mind for a long time.”

— Pavel Mandys, iLiteratura

Links

Author website: www.kareljerie.cz
Publisher: www.bbart.cz

Illustrations

Jan Šumbera

Headworld — By the Curious Pilgrim
Hlavosvět – U Zvědavého poutníka

(Petrklíč, 360 pages)

Who would have thought that someone would choose a thirteen year old girl as an instrument to create a new world, a better world than our current one? But escaping from pain and suffering isn’t so simple, especially when there are people who shamelessly trample on the happiness of others while searching for their own. And would a world without evil be truly good? Children, old men, pixies, trolls, wolves, Creators, Artists of nature, all appear in Šumbera’s novel. Each character has their own unique Headworld and everything is connected by mysterious runes from the petals of extinct rune trees. This sophisticated novel is permeated with kindness and depth, leaving the reader in no doubt that it is an exceptional piece of literature, and not only within the fantasy genre. Headworld is the debut novel of a young author who is still relatively unknown, but what we do know is that Šumbera has attracted the attention of critics with his undeniable talent.

Praise

“The storytelling sometimes takes on surreal dreamlike qualities and imagery […] It is dominated by an almost automatic stream of speech which forms and tangles the world of the narrative.”

— Pavel Janoušek, Tvar 4/2016

Links

Publisher: www.petrklic.info

Excerpt ▼

The leaves quivered quietly. He opened one eye and then the other, then woke up. Alemen was still sleeping. He quietly left the network of branches. Suddenly he sensed something new. All around him he could see a flow of energy. He felt the colossal tree pulsing with powerful energy.

“Is that you?” he said inside his mind. “The sage who transformed into a tree?”

“Yes, Ollváni, it is me. How is it possible that you can sense me?”

“I don’t know. Something has changed. Overnight.”

“Just as I thought.”

“The world is completely different. Somehow more alive.”

“Climb down, lad, and let Alemen sleep.”

It was a fresh morning. Here and there rays of sunshine penetrated the branches and lit up the inside of the tree like a kaleidoscope. Ollváni quickly jumped down to the lower branches. The strange smell disappeared into the background and he could distinguish a wild energy shimmering in the air. The old man was waiting for him on the wide lower branches. Ollváni went over to him and he reached out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, Ollváni.”

Ollváni knew that it was Enten Filigrán, the old man who had transformed into a tree. He looked at him in amazement. He could feel the pressure of his hand perfectly. Enten smiled.

“See how perfect your imagination is? How real I am? And that’s just the beginning. Now I will be able to teach you and make a Creator out of you. And you know how a student repays his teacher?”

“No,” whispered Ollváni in wonder. He knew about Creators from the book The Awakening and he admired them.

“He surpasses him,” smiled Enten. “And I’m sure that’ll happen soon.

“How is it that I can perceive everything so clearly?”

“It’s thanks to Celkel. He underwent an initiation in the Land of Self-Realization. Now it is certain that a Creator slumbers within you.”

“Thanks to Celkel? How am I connected to him?”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of finding that out for yourself,” said the old man mysteriously. “And what’s more, it will be beneficial for your relationship.”

“And can I go and see Celkel now?”

“Yes, lad. I think that would be appropriate. However, I’d like to explain about the powers you’ve acquired.”

“Can we do it now?” Ollváni was very impatient. He wanted to see Celkel as soon as possible.

“Yes. I’ll tell you everything which I think is of vital importance. You might not understand everything now, but when you experience it for yourself, everything will be clear to you. The Dream has awoken inside of you. The Dream is the beginning of a Creator’s spiritual development. Your mind opened up thanks to the pilgrimage which Celkel undertook. Otherwise the Dream would have appeared much later – fifteen years of age at the earliest. The depths of your mind began to filter through to the surface, and energy pathways in your brain and body began to mature and develop.”

“And what is this Dream?”

“It is the essence which is common to all people. But it is so deep that only a Creator can embrace it. It is so peculiar that if anyone other than a Creator attempts to delve into it, their mind will be lost in a whirlwind of ideas, and suddenly their mind will be unable to recognize what is real and what isn’t. Such people go mad. Do you know who the Bluenans are?”

“The blue angels of ruin?”

“You could call them that. They are tasked with searching for a Creator and awakening the Dream within him. Whoever looks at them must uncover Depth in his mind.”

“And is it really just a Dream?”

“Yes and no. It is as real as everything around us, but at the same time it is only a dream.”

“And who dreams it?”

“A young girl who is only a couple of years older than you. She is from the Ejimén family. Over history this family amassed an incredible spiritual wealth. They were people who, above all else, cultivated purity of thought and propriety of behaviour.”

“What does that mean?”

“They belonged to the Nature Artists. They lived in perfect harmony with nature in the city of Lezeb. They did everything in order to be pure beings. They were able to delve very deeply into the wellspring of human action. This predestined them to be able to see even the darkest recesses of the mind and heal them. What is more, the openness that the Nature Artists acknowledged meant that they could not hide anything. The girl isn’t entirely of pure blood because the Ejimén family died out. She doesn’t know anything about them. However, the mission which the Ejimén family made their own lies deep within the girl. The depth of her soul is filled with the atmosphere and methods of their way of thinking, their passions and myths. It is as large as our world. And our world is slowly evolving to become the image of this mind. We also come from it. Our world absorbs it and materializes it to become its image.”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Iva Procházková

The Zodiac Murders / Man at the Bottom
Vraždy v kruhu / Muž na dně

(Paseka, 335 pages)

Are you a fan of Jo Nesbø or the Danish-Swedish series The Bridge? Then you’re sure to enjoy Procházková’s newest novel. Although the book was published at then end of 2014, its popularity increased significantly in 2015 when it was turned into a successful Czech television series. A Polish translation of the novel will be published this year by Afera as the first book in a Czech crime series. Procházková is the recipient of many awards – five Golden Ribbons, two Magnesia Literas in the category of books for children and youth, as well as the most prestigious German award for children’s books, the Friedrich Gerstäcker Award. Her books have been translated into many languages, especially German. In The Zodiac Murders, a myriad of peculiar people surface around a dead man found in a lake: from a cannabis grower to a famous architect, a promiscuous cop to a mysterious woman from Cuba. How many motives can one murder have? We follow the unorthodox criminologist Holina as he struggles through the maze of the investigation. At the same time the novel looks deep into lives connected by a mesh of strong emotions and contradictory actions.

Praise

“The clever, realistic, skilfully constructed and in many ways unconventional plot is one of the best to be found in Czech detective novels in recent years.”

— Pavel Mandys, Hospodářské noviny

“The author’s narrative style is elegant in the way it gradually dispenses information, is attentive to nuances in character and able to work with a wide range of settings.”

— Vítek Schmarc, Respekt

Links

Author website: www.ivaprochazkova.com
Publisher: paseka.cz

Excerpt ▼

Jáchym had an inkling Stinker would arrive, even though it didn’t usually happen on Sunday afternoons. Hemp day was traditionally a Saturday, sometimes a Friday, as well as all the holidays. People didn’t just want grass at New Year, but also at Easter and on the first of May. In Kladensko, Jáchym made sure there was a good mood for every season of the year and all weathers, and insiders knew it. Unfortunately Stinker knew it too.

He removed his surgical mask, cleaned the sprinkler and took off his gloves. It hadn’t rained in a while and the pests in the orchard had multiplied over the past few days. They were also in the vegetables. Caterpillars, gall midges and flea beetles. However, the greenhouses where the hemp was grown maintained a high humidity, which was the best prevention against mites. In May some spider mites would show up and they could be gotten rid of easily with neem oil before they started to form colonies. Now the plants appeared healthy and were growing quickly.

A green van turned into the entrance. Milan came twice a week for fresh lettuce, which he then distributed to restaurants. He also used to take carnations, but after his mother moved to Nymburk Jáchym stopped growing them. He wanted time to do the things he enjoyed the most.

“So you’ve caught up with me again,” said Milan as soon as he got out of the van. “Happy birthday! When are you going to celebrate?”

“I might give it a miss this year. It’s not a special birthday.”

They were the same age. Milan had celebrated his 32nd birthday at the start of spring, and Jáchym was used to combining his birthday celebrations with the solstice. He enjoyed having a party under the stars. He’d invite his friends over and they’d sit in the garden, have a barbecue, sing and play the guitar. Quite often they’d stay up till morning and Jáchym would have the feeling that they were connected by something bigger than their little lives. He and his friends never talked about God, but those nights spent together under the stars were filled with love. This year there was no thought of having a party. Because of Stinker.

“How’s your dad?” he asked as he was passing Milan a tray of lettuce.

“He’s holding on.”

Jáchym had known old Stašek since he was a child, when he took them to football training. Now he was seventy with advanced Parkinson’s, and in the autumn Jáchym would send him some hemp roots. Milan’s father made a syrup from them, which helped him fight the illness through the winter. During the growing season he chewed the fresh leaves. Jáchym had them all ready for Milan. They were freshly picked.

“Dad’s really grateful to you,” said Milan when he was paying for the lettuces.

“He can only cope because of the hemp. Nothing else helps him.”

Jáchym nodded. He knew the power of hemp, though he never took money for the roots and leaves he gave to Mr Stašek. Occasionally, though, Milan would bring him a small treat. Today he brought a cake box out of the van.

“There was a wedding in the family, so here’s a little something for you.”

Jáchym opened the lid. The box was full of small cakes and pastries. He thanked him and put one in his mouth.

“And what about you? When are you going to take the plunge with Hedvika?” asked Milan.

“Soon. Maybe in the autumn.”

“Tell her I’m asking for her.” Milan got into the van, reversed onto the road, waved goodbye to Jáchym and drove round the wall of the farm towards Kladno. Jáchym watched him go. The mention of Hedvika had quickened his pulse. He started thinking about Stinker again. I can’t have him behaving that way. He would have to take him down a peg or two. But how? Stinker was dangerous. And intelligent. He had managed to hide his dark side as cleverly as everything else. He had the right face for it: manly, well chiselled, honest, with blue eyes and crow’s feet, giving the impression that he smiled a lot. But he almost never smiled. His eyes followed you like a cobra’s.

Jáchym wondered how many people realized what a low life lurked behind that mask of honesty. Stinker. He went into the house, walked along the hallway and stuck his head into the room. Hedvika was lying on the sofa. Her eyes were closed, but he knew she wasn’t sleeping.

He sat down beside her, cake box in hand.

“Milan sends his best,” he said. “Fancy some wedding cake?”

She turned her head sharply to the other side. The ear that she had been lying on was bright red. He stroked it with his fingertips.

She flinched.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“What do you want me to do?” he replied.

“Kill him.”

His father had always said that good should overcome evil. But sometimes there is no choice.

“All right.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him hard. Then she grimaced.

“You don’t mean it.”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Štěpán Kopřiva

Quick-fire
Rychlopalba

(Crew, 376 pages)

A classic hard-boiled detective story by an expert in the genre, which has been nominated for the best Czech detective novel of the year award. Kopřiva is a freelance author and screenwriter, co-author of Nitro (Nitro těžkne glycerínem), the first Czech comic book to achieve success abroad, and co-founder of the Crew magazine and publishing house. What would you do if the police rang your doorbell one evening and told you that for years you had been unknowingly hurting your child? Or if psychiatrists told you that you suffer from a personality disorder and sent you to an insane asylum? That’s exactly what happened to Olga Turnečková. And although the people around her initially supported her, they eventually accepted that she really did torture her own daughter. But then Olga’s brother discovers a clue that things might not be quite as they seem and hires a detective who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth.

Praise

“An unexpectedly credible and well-structured hard-boiled novel.”

— Pavel Mandys, Hospodářské noviny

“Alongside an ordinary police patrolman we delve into an inner labyrinth, into a darkness which chills to the bone. For the author to be able to create this journey with such ease and trenchant humour is exceptional.”

— David Jan Žák, Českobudějovický deník

“If you’re looking for a Czech detective novel, then it has to be Štěpán Kopřiva’s Quick-fire.”

— Iva Lutonská, Kultura21.cz

Links

Publisher: www.crew.cz

Excerpt ▼

The body lay in the kitchen. It wasn’t a nice kitchen and the body wasn’t much to look at either.

In Tom and Jerry, when Jerry batters Tom with a frying pan, a funny big lump swells up on his head. This woman’s brain had come out of her head. Not particularly amusing.

The culprit must have hit her several times with the frying pan. And when I say several times, I mean about fifty times. Her skull looked like a melon that someone had thrown from the eighth floor.

It showed that the frying pan was expensive. That means heavy. From steel and iron. It could easily have weighed two kilos.

“We have that kind of frying pan at home,” said Holub. “It’s a good one.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Zdenka and I were thinking about getting a similar one. Would you recommend it?”

“Do you see that checked pattern? That’s a nonstick surface. Titanium or something. And this red circle in the middle shows you when it’s hot. Magda does steaks for me on it.”

“Watch out that she doesn’t start doing brains,” I said, nodding towards the grey splatter on the floor.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Holub.

“No? Cos you love each other?” It was hard not to be cynical, especially after this morning. But I was trying not to be.

“No, because Magda isn’t patient enough for this kind of thorough work. She would hit me once and that’d be it. To give someone a pounding like this, that person would really need to get on your nerves.” Holub thought for a moment. “Well, OK, maybe she’d hit me twice. Or five times.”

“You’re right, this pig really took the job seriously,” I admitted. “A thorough guy.”

The thorough guy was beng guarded by Richter and Slídová next door, in the living room. He was sitting on the leather sofa wearing slippers; he had a well-trimmed moustache, his fingers were yellow from nicotine and he was shaking uncontrollably. The husband. Exactly according to the statistics: in 95% of cases the culprit is a member of the family. The guys from homicide referred to these cases as domestic butchery.

“Oh yeah, build up your strength, swing, you’re a success,” said Holub, blowing his nose. “Good work for a right-hander.”

“A left-hander.”

“Eh?”

“He had the frying pan in his left hand. Look at the angle. And also which side of the head is more flattened.”

A white cat observed us from the kitchen units above us, ostentatiously licking its paws as though to show how he was washing his hands of the whole mess. Apparently the reincarnation of Pontius Pilate.

“I trust you’ve managed to trample all over the place,” came a voice from behind us. “Can you explain to me why you came into the kitchen?”

We turned round. Behind us stood a fat guy in jeans and a bomber jacket. This was a real giveaway. Almost everyone in homicides wears a bomber jacket; it’s their unofficial uniform. I had never seen the fat guy before – but there was nothing strange in that. I hadn’t been at many murders yet.

“We’re securing the crime scene,” reported Holub. “Until the response team arrives.”

“It’s just arrived,” said the fat guy, pointing his thumb at his chest. “And it certainly doesn’t need two local uniformed plodders messing up all the clues.”

We usually got on well with the investigators from the CID, mainly because as a rule they barely even noticed us. Fatty here was an exception. He noticed us all too much. “So, are you going to get out of here or what?”

Obediently we went around him into the hallway, leaving him to lord it over the crime scene. I saw Richter in the living room, standing above the husband, thumbs hooked into his belt, his peaked cap genially pushed to the back of his head. We exchanged glances; Richter looked towards the kitchen and mouthed the word Prick.

“When I said get out,” said the fat guy, leaning out of the doorway, “I didn’t mean just head into the hallway, which is even smaller than the kitchen. How do you think the technicians will get in when they want to take fingerprints and footprints? I meant get out completely. Out of the flat. Out of this case. Don’t you have some really important work to do? Like chasing some fuckers who steal manhole covers or something? Don’t worry, we can secure the scene ourselves.”

“I can see that,” I said, pointing into the kitchen. Pontius Pilate had jumped down from the cupboards and was licking the spilled brains from the floor behind Fatty’s back.

Fatty turned round. “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Shoo! Horrible old moggy! Fuck off!”

We left too.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Zdenka Hamerová

The Secret of Klejinka
Klejinčino tajemství

(Motto, 328 pages)

Hamerová is an experienced author, popular with readers and critics. Her latest book, The Secret of Klejinka, has been nominated for the best Czech detective novel of the year award. Tina has remarried and is starting a new life with her second husband, Martin, and their three sons. They have bought a run down hundred-year old villa, which the locals call Klejinka. While Tina’s family is happy in their new home, she feels that the villa hasn’t accepted them and everything is plotting against her. Tina begins to investigate the history of the villa to find out what is really haunting her, but then death strikes…

Praise

“Readable, humorous and written with a light touch […] Hamerová knows how to write and create a nightmarish atmosphere, while the relationships between the thirtysomethings are realistic.”

— Juan Zamora, iLiteratura

“I would confidently compare Zdenka Hamerová to the Swedish author Camille Läckberg […] Hamerová is a genuine master at combining horror with humour.”

— Veronika Černucká, SeverskéDetektivky.cz

Links

Publisher: www.motto.cz

Excerpt ▼

“Dušan, you didn’t have an argument, did you? It looks like she’s gone off to sulk. If she’s inside, she must have heard us looking for her,” said Alice, gradually opening all the doors with Dušan. They peered into the empty, musty rooms, which Tina wouldn’t have gone into for all the money in the world.

“No, we don’t usually argue,” he replied, opening up a large room with a balcony. “Eva just isn’t here,” he groaned.

“And have you checked downstairs thoroughly? Are her coat and shoes there? She can’t just have been swallowed up by the ground! Maybe she went for a walk,” suggested Alice.

“She wouldn’t have gone without me!” shouted Dušan, his voice starting to break into a sob.

“Dušan,” said Tina, holding him gently around the waist. “Why are you so upset? Maybe someone else made her angry?”

“No! I don’t understand what’s happened. I’m so worried about her!”

“The balcony door is open,” remarked Alice. The loose old floorboards creaked with every step she took.

“I thought so. I could feel a draught,” said Tina, stretching her neck out to see. “Close it, seeing as you’re there,” said Tina to Alice.

“I’ll have a look outside,” said Alice. “Maybe she’s wandering about in the park and I’ll catch sight of her. Was she very drunk?”

“She didn’t seem to be,” answered Tina. “And don’t go out onto the balcony. The railing is coming away, and I wouldn’t trust that floor either. Klejinka’s really dilapidated on this side.”

But it was too late. Alice was already standing on the balcony. “You’re right. Part of the railing is missing,” she shouted.

“Come back right now!” ordered Dušan, walking over to Alice.

“Alice, are you mad or what?! It’s freezing. Come back!” complained Tina, who realized she was on her own. She looked furtively around her.

“Jesus Christ!” cried Alice.

“What is it?! Come back at once!” screamed Tina hysterically as either a loose stone or a piece of the facade fell. “Alice, you’re scaring me!”

Now Dušan was on the balcony as well. “It won’t hold you, you idiots! Don’t go near the railing! Come back right now!”

“Oh, no! Eva, no!” cried Dušan, wailing like an injured animal.

“What’s happened?” asked Tina as Alice emerged from the darkness of the large parquet-floored room, ashen-faced and with shocked, shining blue eyes.

“I think Eva’s fallen. She’s lying down there, below the balcony,” she said in a deep, expressionless voice. “We have to help her.”

“Wh-What? What are you talking about?” cried Tina as the meaning of her words began to sink in.

Dušan came back into the room, curled himself into a ball and sobbed.

“Stop wailing and get up, Dušan! We have to help her!” screamed Alice, and she pulled him wildly by the arm until he finally got up.

“How are you going to help her? Are you blind or something? She fell from that stupid balcony,” sobbed Dušan. “No-one can help her now! She’s dead!”

Dead? Tina’s throat was gripped by horror. She just stood there with her arms at her sides, her mouth wide open.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Jiří Březina

Time-barred
Promlčení

(Motto, 248 pages)

Březina won the best Czech detective novel award in 2013 for On the Hill (Na kopci) and his latest novel, Time-barred, has been nominated for the award this year. It is the first volume of a planned series of books about detective Tomáš Volf. While studying time-barred cases, the young detective discovers a strange death which took place in 1991 in a small village near the Austrian border. When he comes across a second suspicious death, Volf decides to question a man who was involved in both investigations. Through the man’s memories, Volf tries to uncover information which has mysteriously disappeared from the files. But can he trust the man who has since become a notorious politician? What role does the history of this forgotten region play in the case? And how many layers will Volf have to uncover to reveal who got away with not one, but two murders all those years ago?

Praise

“Březina has written a quality detective novel.”

— Jan M. Heller, iLiteratura

“Time-barred is a very good crime novel about unforgotten memories.”

— Václav Grubhoffer, Českobudějovický deník

Links

Author website: www.jiribrezina.cz
Publisher: www.motto.cz

Excerpt ▼

“My door is always open to the police, Mr Volf.” Novotný’s smile was slightly wider and his handshake a little more forceful than was natural. In real life he didn’t come across as well as he did on his election posters.

A corpulent, ruddy-faced bigwig. Expensive sports jacket with a T-shirt underneath, and under the T-shirt a well-padded belly. Fashionable glasses which didn’t seem to suit his face. No doubt some stylist had told him how to dress – something to show how modern and dynamic he was.

Now he was sitting at his designer table, devoid of any features that suggested work, smiling at Tomáš with his professionally taught grin. Behind the glass door to the politician’s office, over-caffeinated marketing experts and shady operators darted about, apparently all part of the Liberals’ election staff. But it was quiet inside the office.

“How can I help you?” asked Novotný, looking at his watch.

Tomáš knew that he had to tread carefully. There were only a couple of weeks left until the early elections. If the polls were right, then Novotný would be the man Tomáš ultimately answered to. Minister of the Interior.

“Thank you for finally seeing me. Perhaps you can help me with one issue.”

“So apparently you’re here because of an old case.”

“Yes, that’s what I wrote to you in the email.” Tomáš opened his bag. He placed some yellowed papers onto the table. “I was trying to sort out the files from regional headquarters and I came across this. Pasečky, 1991.”

He looked closely at Novotný. The politician didn’t react. He appeared to be disinterested. Like a man hearing the name for the first time.

Tomáš thought about the last few weeks when he had been trying to get in touch with this man. When he called here, Novotný never answered the phone. Volf always spoke to people whose only role seemed to be to deflect all conversations away from Novotný.

Novotný never replied to his emails either. Then in one of his messages he mentioned the place Pasečky. Within a few minutes he received a reply – a negative one.

Tomáš didn’t give up. He acted properly but persistently. He kept on asking until he received an email which might be construed as an invitation.

He sent the email on to Novotný’s assistant and attached a request for a meeting. And it worked. That was two weeks ago.

“The file that I’m here about isn’t complete. And according to the records, you were the last one to look at it.”

“Really?” Novotný looked at the ceiling for a moment as though he was finally remembering something. “You could be right. But that was a good few years ago.”

“It was. You looked at it in 2009. I’d like you to fill in a few small details about this case.”

Novotný lifted his arms. “Of course, fire away. However, I can’t promise you that I’ll remember everything.”

Tomáš smiled. “I understand. Why did you ask to look at the file that time?”

Novotný stood up and went over to the cabinet. He reached behind some jackets that were hanging up and with a slightly guilty smile brought out a bottle of whisky and two glasses. When he saw Tomáš’s gesture of refusal, he put one glass back and poured out one for himself.

“After all those years, I wanted to remember. I wanted to remind myself of my first case…”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Pavel Renčín

Captive
Vězněná

(Argo, 236 pages)

Captive is one of the few novels combining horror and thriller penned by a Czech author and published by one of the most prestigious Czech publishing houses. Renčín has won three Aeronautilus awards for authors of science-fiction, fantasy and horror and is a prolific writer. His most recent novel was inspired by true events and is Renčín’s best thriller to date. The reader is plunged into the stifling atmosphere of solitude, wild nature and evil, beyond human comprehension. Secondary school teacher Marin suffers from nightmares and strange memory lapses. He feels as if an invisible swamp was dragging him down and begins to have uncontrollable fits of rage. Then the spectre of a dead girl who he feels he recognises appears in his bed. When reading the novel you might be reminded of the works of Stephen King, which have a similar eerie atmosphere.

Praise

“Captive by Pavel Renčín stands out in the Czech Republic due to its unusually vicious darkness.”

— Blesk

“During the short time that it’s been around, Captive has managed to attract an unexpected amount of attention […] We need many more books like this.”

— Jáchym Šidlák, Sarden

Links

Author website: www.pavelrencin.cz
Publisher: www.argo.cz

Excerpt ▼

CHAPTER I

I awoke, and when I abruptly opened my eyes a darkness entered, occupying my entire soul…

I lay on my back on the wide bed and above me hung the ceiling, just one shade of grey lighter than the walls of the room. Fragments of a dream, which I couldn’t remember but which had left me with a gnawing sense of anxiety, slowly began to fade and I realized that I was at home in my flat in Pankrac. I listened to my own breathing, which tore the silence like a blunt knife, and I could also hear, from the giddy height of the thirteenth floor, the distant hum of the night-time motorway. From the railway yard came the metallic clanging of the goods trucks and the clinking of the tracks, which found their way into my room despite the locked window. It must have been well after midnight – pitch dark outside and not a trace of morning. Whilst part of me was trying to figure out what had woken me up, another part was succumbing to drowsiness and I slowly began to fall asleep. Then I heard it again:

A scratching in the hallway.

What could be scratching in the hallway at three in the morning? All thoughts of sleep quickly left me. The room had frozen into immobility. There was the ticking of the clock on the wall beside the door. Dust settled on the clothes horse, whose struts stretched out like the legs of a daddy-long-legs. Moonlight pushed its way through a gap in the curtains, falling onto a pile of magazines on the bedside table, with a three-month-old copy of Reflex on top. On the wall beside the display cabinet hung the skin of a monitor lizard, a pointless souvenir from a trip to India. The lizard stared at me with his dried-out eyeballs, which seemed to say: knock, knock, you have a visitor, my friend.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps the girl I lived with had gone to the toilet. This had almost reassured me when I turned over and saw the blanket outlining her body. She lay next to me, silently and without moving. Before I had time to think, the sounds from the hallway came again, more clearly than before. The shuffling of feet.

I held my breath and didn’t utter a sound. I fixed my gaze on the closed bedroom door, afraid to move. Someone was prowling around in my flat. It was like a nightmare I had had many times before, except this time it was real. There was a stranger here and I was lying on my back in my bed, defenceless, frozen with fear. The steps came to a halt in front of the bedroom door. Terror pushed me down into the bed. My heart was pounding like crazy.

It flashed through my head that I might have some kind of weapon to hand, perhaps I could use the clothes horse, or maybe I had left a knife on the bedside table after supper… I was hypnotized by the door handle; I couldn’t tear my gaze away from it. Was it just my imagination or was it slowly moving downwards? My fingers trembled uncontrollably. The handle reached all the way down, and between the door and the dark space of the hallway a crack began to widen. With a certainty known only from dreams, I knew that there was something terrible behind the door…

I turned towards the woman… I wanted to wake her up, warn her, shake her, rouse her…but I couldn’t. It was too late.

The door was open and behind it awaited the darkness. I screwed up my eyes and tried to look through it, but I couldn’t, and when I heard those scratchy steps, that shuffling, careful treading, moving towards me, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I cried out. I leapt out of the bed and reached for the lamp, which I clasped onto like a mace. I threw myself at the unknown assailant, but I didn’t notice a cable running just above the floor. I tripped and collided with a chair, falling headfirst. I instinctively put out my arms, but my hands just hit the clothes horse, which gave way under the weight, and I crashed into the wall, stars spinning in front of my eyes.

Perhaps I lost consciousness for a moment. When I finally got to my feet again, I felt a huge bump on my forehead. I turned on the light, which flashed painfully into my eyes. The bedroom looked as though a bomb had hit it. The clothes horse was overturned and twisted, the lamp was broken, and the cable to the computer was ripped out from the wall, taking with it the plug point, which was giving off a few sparks. The night visitor was nowhere to be seen.

The light gave me enough courage to creep into the kitchen for a knife. I gripped it tightly as I went through each room one by one. I put on all the lights and even opened up the wardrobe. I checked the front door – all the locks were intact and the safety chain was in place.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

The days when men dominated the literary limelight are long gone. Gone too are the days when to most people the idea of “literature written by women” meant opening the floodgates to a world of romantic and usually unrequited love. The benches have disappeared under a blanket of wild roses, the pink umbrellas from Monet’s paintings have been put away, the heart pierced by an arrow on the birch tree beyond the field has been devoured by time.

Dusk falls and a once chaste, naïve girl from high society takes off her elegant chemise the colour of innocence. She is naked. In the morning she awakes as a new woman. The morning coffee tastes just as it should. She lights her first cigarette, throws a satin gown round her shoulders and sits down to a blank sheet of paper. She begins to write. She writes about modern women’s literature from the present, which with every word is becoming the past. She is thoughtful, bright and every inch a woman. She has matured from a naïve, sighingly romantic girl and has plunged headlong into the mysterious world of literature, which remains closed off to women lacking in courage. She opens the gate, whose handle gleams from the touch of predominantly male hands, and starts to write the first paragraph on modern female literature.

The archetypal modern female writer is a woman who is talented, educated, open-minded and knows herself. She is not worried that she might shock with themes that go beyond the boundaries, because there are no boundaries. She doesn’t even mind offering up (though not on a silver platter) part of her intimate life to readers and critics who read between the lines. On the contrary, she is able to use her individuality as a selling point and thus extend a helping hand to those who have experienced something similar but haven’t found the courage to speak or write about it for fear of criticism.

The modern Czech female novelist writes about Czech history and the lives of those who have been psychologically scarred by it. She is interested in far-off countries with different cultures and she writes about the local people as though they were our neighbours. The modern Czech female novelist writes about the love of a woman for a man and about the love of a woman for a woman. She opens up what is still a sensitive topic for many people: sexuality and sexual orientation. The modern Czech female writer does not know the meaning of the word taboo. She enjoys controversy, but she does not deliberately court it. She knows her worth. She likes openness and digs deep down to its very core. In her writing she draws you in with the verisimilitude of the main characters’ feelings, while also masterfully handling the plot. The modern Czech female writer seems to pull hitherto invisible (or rather unseen) themes out of her hat, and yet even she likes to return home, to be a little girl again, hiding behind her mother’s skirts. A little girl who can believe anything that comes into her head. At least until that moment when she wakes up to a new morning and everything has suddenly changed.

The twenty-first-century publishing industry has been churning out book after book. Some are swept away by time while others endure. The most successful ones also usher their author into the spotlight, and from that point on critics and readers will expect one miracle after another from them to stir up the stagnant literary waters. And then there are all the different literary prizes as indicators of the quality of new publications. If a Czech book is widely read, is interesting and has won a literary prize, then translators will soon set their sights on it. And thus the modern Czech book leaves its native land.

Which modern Czech female writers (and books written by them) now form part of the contemporary Czech literature scene? First of all, we’ll look at the stand-out names. These are: Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Radka Denemarková, Petra Hůlová, Kateřina Tučková, Jakuba Katalpa and Irena Dousková. It is worth adding that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to create a kind of league table of writers, where individual authors would be ranked according to how widely read and translated they were and how many awards they had won. Therefore, we are only going to look at those women writers who appear on CzechLit. This is a kind of showcase for high-quality works of modern Czech literature that have been adorned with various literary prizes, which has led to them being translated into many different languages.

The first to emerge onto the scene was Zuzana Brabcová (1959 – 2015), who was the first ever recipient of the Jiří Orten Prize in 1987. As with several other female writers who we will look at, Zuzana Brabcová was endowed with a love of literature by her family. She was the daughter of the literary critic and historian Jiří Brabec and the literary historian, editor and translator Zina Trochová. Zuzana Brabcová was the author of six novels and at the same time worked as a publishing editor at Český spisovatel, Hynek and Garamond. She received the Jiří Orten Prize for her second novel, Daleko od stromu [Chip off the Old Block], from 1984. It looks at the metaphorical floods of the 1970s and early 1980s, when Prague was submerged by the hungry waves of socialism. Her lesbian novel Rok Perel [Year of Pearls] from 2000 received a particularly stormy reception; during the launch of the book she openly stated that she shared a household with her daughter, her husband and her girlfriend. She then received a Magnesia Litera in 2013 for her fifth novel, Stropy [Ceilings]. In this novel the writer dealt with the subject of people trapped in psychiatric clinics, and this paved the way for all kinds of inner dialogues. She shifts from reality to dreams and back again, blurring the borders between fantasy and what is real. The Egyptian translator Khalid Biltagi was so impressed by Stropy that he chose to translate it into Arabic. He commented that “I enjoyed Ceilings tremendously. It is an amazing novel and very challenging to translate. The narration is so magical that as soon as my Arabic translation came out various reviews immediately appeared, and so the book made its way into academic circles.”

Zuzana Brabcová’s novels have been translated into a number of foreign languages including German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Slovenian and Hungarian.

Another woman on the modern Czech literature scene is the novelist, poet, translator and literary theorist Daniela Hodrová (*1946), who is the recipient of the State Award for Literature, the Franz Kafka Prize and most recently the Magnesia Litera. She is the daughter of the theatre and film actor Zdeněk Hodr, and her husband was the poet, novelist and translator Karel Milota. Daniela Hodrová worked as an editor at the Odeon publishing house, and then for several years was head of the department of literary theory at the Institute for Czech Literature.

Daniela Hodrová’s works have been characterized as postmodern and due to the abundance of metaphors and allegories require a more sophisticated reader. With her fondness for describing the psychological states of her characters, her style suggests the influence of Ladislav Fuks, a writer of psychological prose with an undertone of anxiety. Her most important works include the trilogy Trýznivé město: Podobojí, Kukly, Théta [City of Torment: A Kingdom of Souls, Chrysalides, Theta], published in 1991, and Román zasvěcení [The Novel of Initiation] from 1993. In her trilogy of novels, the author wanders around a mysterious Prague and tries to come to terms with the death of those close to her through her written and unwritten life. She inquires into the spiritual meaning of existence and blurs the line between terrestrial and extraterrestrial life. On the other hand, The Novel of Initiation is a journey charting the metamorphosis of the novel of initiation²⁸Novel of Initiation (from Latin initium = start, entry), also a novel of consecration – a type of novel characterized by the main character’s efforts at esoteric (ESP, deep) knowledge, attempts at inner cleansing, reincarnation, communion with God, discovering one’s identity, moving from one state to another higher and more perfect state, internal transformation through the highest form of knowledge; it contains elements of an educational and developmental novel. as it was known in the ancient world and the Middle Ages and as we know it today in the modern age²⁹For example, in Franz Kafka’s Castle and Umbert Eco’s Name of the Rose. This year the author was awarded the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year for her most recent novel, Točité věty [Spiral Sentences]. Here too Daniela Hodrová raises the half-forgotten dead from the other side to meet with the living. She layers memories into sentences which spiral in a cycle. “A word longs for a word, a sentence winds into a sentence, sentences of words are the victims of an unknown prophecy, between words a sentence, to branch out, to prophesy…”³⁰http://archiv.ihned.cz/c1-65235680-magnesia-litera-hodrova-bolava-ceny Her apparently endless sentences have the feel of an experimental stream of consciousness with elements of poetry. This style gives her book a certain musical melody, where Munch’s Scream occasionally intrudes with all of its vital urgency. Today it is possible to read Daniela Hodrová’s works in English, German, French, Italian, Polish and Bulgarian.

Radka Denemarková (*1968) has enjoyed even greater success abroad and is one of the most widely translated modern Czech female authors. She has not only found success as a novelist, but also as a literary historian, screenwriter, dramaturge and translator of German prose and plays. She has also worked as a researcher at the Academy of Science’s Institute for Czech Literature. Radka Denemarková’s books have been translated into fifteen languages. She is also the recipient of numerous important literary and drama awards³¹She immediately won three Magnesia Literas, each for a different genre. For the novel Money from Hitler she was awarded a Magnesia Litera for prose in 2007; Smrt, nebudeš se báti aneb Příběh Petra Lébla [Thou Shalt Not Fear Death: The Story of Petr Lébl, 2009] was awarded the Magnesia Litera for journalism, and finally she was also awarded a Magnesia Litera for translation for Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel (2011).. Her novel Peníze od Hitlera. Letní mozaika [Money from Hitler: A Summer Mosaic] from 2006 won the Magnesia Litera for prose. Two women in two different time lines, a hunger for freedom and a desire for justice. Lawlessness, violence, the lifelong trauma of innocents and the shadow of revenge – these are the central ingredients in the dark story of a series of events stretching back to 1945 which have tarnished Czech history forever. The book is a powerful, raw story which bears out Franz Kafka’s quote that “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”³²From an interview with Denemarková for Literární.cz.

Another important writer on the modern Czech literary scene is Petra Hůlová (*1979), whose work also received several literary prizes. Her debut novel, Paměť mojí babičce [All This Belongs to Me], from 2002 was awarded the Magnesia Litera in the category Discovery of the Year. The novel is mainly set in Mongolia, where the writer had found inspiration during her travels³³Petra Hůlová was in Mongolia from 2000 to 2001 as part of her course in Mongolian studies at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. She also visited the USA, which inspired her to write Cirkus Les Mémoires.. Her book tells the stories of Mongolian women growing up in a traditional society with all its advantages and pitfalls. Her fourth novel, Umělohmotný třípokoj [Plastic-furnished, Three-bedroom], was also a success and won the Jiří Orten Prize. This thematically and stylistically bold novel is also indirectly related to Alice in Wonderland, though written for adults. It is filled with erotica and the long-harboured desires of all those who long to throw off their inhibitions but do not have access to the world beyond the mirror.

The final award in the trio was the Josef Škvorecký Prize for the adventure novel Stanice Tajga [Tajga Station] in 2008. In the novel Petra Hůlová heads to post-Soviet Russia, specifically the Siberian taiga, as pictured on the ice-white cover of the book. She heads to “an infinitely wide and sparsely populated area, which we see reduced to local labour camps, a railway and the remains of the original tribal societies with their rich mythology. The writer included all of this in her book. Her fifth novel unfolds between the years immediately following the war and the present – and the Siberian village of Charyn, which reflects the ‘old’ world with room for the ‘spirit of the taiga’, is contrasted with the ‘new’, modern and developed world, which is synecdochially represented by Denmark.”³⁴From a review by Radim Kopáč in Právo

Petra Hůlová’s books have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Polish and Hungarian. The important Egyptian Bohemist Khalid Biltagi selected Hůlová’s Strážci občanského dobra [Guardians of the Civic Good]³⁵It is a work which reflects post-revolutionary Czech developments. In another of her dark books freedom and new opportunities do flourish, but on the other hand chaos and pessimism also develop. Here the translator found parallels with the post-revolution period in Egypt, where one bleak regime was exchanged for another. to translate into Arabic.

The writer and art historian Kateřina Tučková (*1980) first entered the public consciousness through her second book Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch [The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch]³⁶At the end of April 1945, German-speaking Brno residents were expelled from their homes and driven inhumanely across Pohořelice towards Austria. Most of the people were women, children and the elderly, and no attempts were made to prove if they had collaborated with fascist Germany. This fictitious account of the expulsion of young Gerta opened up a long-closed chapter in Brno’s history and elsewhere, which led to the politically formulated Brno Declaration of Reconciliation in 2015. One year prior to this, HaDivadlo produced a staged adaptation of the book, directed by Marián Amsler. During her work on the book the author walked along the stretch from Brno to Pohořelice with a rucksack and pram in order to gain at least some idea of what those expellees had experienced. from 2009. The book was based on real-life events and tells the story of a German girl who is expelled from her home in May 1945 as part of the Brno march of death. The book has been reprinted several times and was nominated for the Jiří Orten Prize. Even more popular with readers, however, was Kateřina Tučková’s second novel, entitled Žítkovské bohyně [The Žítková Goddesses], which was published in 2012. Before writing the novel, the author carried out thorough research and conducted interviews with people who lived in the area at the time. The novel is set in the White Carpathians, specifically in a region known as Žítková. It was home to witches and herbalists who had been persecuted by the Catholic Church and were later completely eradicated by the communist regime. The Žítková Goddesses is the story of the female soul and the art of magic. Like the author’s previous work, it refers to events buried in Czech history. For The Žítková Goddesses Kateřina Tučková received the Josef Škvorecký Prize, the Czech Bestseller Award, the Readers’ Award in the Magnesia Litera competition and the Czech Book Readers’ Award. The novel became the most frequently borrowed book by a Czech author from Czech libraries in 2013, and by 2014 had sold more than 100,000 copies. It has been translated into eight languages including German, Polish and Arabic.

Another important writer is Jakuba Katalpa, née Tereza Jandová (*1979). Her first novel, Je hlína k snědku? [Is Soil for Eating?], from 2006 immediately met with critical success. Here, amid all kinds of temptations, the author relates a powerfully erotic tale, which should, however, be seen only as a secondary storyline. Apart from its sensuality, the other main feature of the book is its sensuousness – the book is primarily a very artfully arranged mosaic of scents, smells, colours, sounds and orgasmic experiences. However, one of Jakuba Katalpa’s major literary achievements was her historically themed novel Němci [Germans], which was published in 2013. In a traditionally written narrative the author returns to events from the Second World War. She follows the life of the main character, a German teacher who finds herself working in the Sudetenland during the war. Jakuba Katalpa treats this theme, which is popular with both writers and readers, with a genuine feeling for the personal story of the main character, which “which not only acts as an outline for a colouring book of history, but as a credible and important chronicle.”³⁷http://www.czechlit.cz/en/author/jakuba-katalpa-en/ The novel Germans deservedly won the Josef Škvorecký Prize as well as the Czech Book Award, which brought it to the attention of translators. Soon afterwards it was translated into German, Slovenian, Bulgarian and Macedonian.

The scriptwriter, journalist, novelist and poet Irena Dousková (*1964) is also among the most widely translated female writers. She entered the public consciousness primarily through the novel Hrdý Budžes [B. Proudew] from 1998, which was made famous by a stage version starring Bára Hrzánová. B. Proudew is about the life of a schoolgirl during the communist era with all its spontaneity and absurdity. The tragicomic treatment of the subject was a hit with readers³⁸In the Czech Republic 60,000 copies have been sold and the book has become a bestseller reprinted many times. and theatregoers³⁹The theatrical version has had more than 600 reprises. The theatrical dramatization has also been broadcast repeatedly on Czech Television. alike. It is one of the best known works of Czech prose published after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Translations of the book have already come out in nine languages including English, German and Polish.

Children, something very sad has happened – your classmate Olinka Hlubinová has died, because she was very ill with heart troubles.” So that gave us all a fright, and then we went home. And now I can’t help thinking about it all the time. Olinka isn’t from 2B like me, she’s from 2A, but still. She has short black hair and she’s awfully good at drawing. I don’t really know her, but the teacher has shown us pictures that Olinka drew loads of times, because they’re really good. Now she’s dead, so I probably won’t see her again, but the teacher can go right on showing everybody those pictures. It’s kind of weird.

When I got home I told my mum about it right away, and I asked her why Olinka had died when she was just a little girl, because I already know that somebody dies and then they never come home or go anywhere ever again, but usually when they’re old. And I also asked what heart troubles are and it seems that heart troubles is the worst illness. If someone has heart troubles, then they almost always die. Then Mum gave me two biscuits, probably because I was really down in the dumps. So I’m happy and yet I’m still sad.

—B. Proudew (Hynek, 1998)

Irena Dousková’s poetry is also worthy of attention. In a collection of poems from 2009 entitled Bez karkulky [Without the Riding Hood] she uses humour and self-irony to mask the anxiety in the world of a faltering soul. Don’t expect a lyrical book of fairy tales, but rather some tough and bleak writing full of happy beginnings and macabre endings. The collection Without the Riding Hood is actually about what it would be like if well-known fairy tales unfolded in the way real life does, with all its cruelty and lack of happy endings.

A number of other female writers deserve a mention for their contribution to modern Czech literature. Foremost among them are Eva Hauserová, Kateřina Rudčenková, Lenka Lagronová, Petra Soukupová, Markéta Pilátová, Magdaléna Platzová, Magdalena Wagnerová, Lucie Lomová and two writers who share the same surname – Petra Procházková and Iva Procházková.

Eva Hauserová (*1954) is first and foremost one of the most important Czech feminists. However, she is also a writer, journalist and translator. She was employed at the magazines ABC and Story and the science-fiction magazine Ikarie. She then worked at Harlequin Publishers and also as an advertising copywriter. She has translated a wide range of novels for women and published several guides to feminism. She was behind the translation of the famous play The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.

Another female writer whose work should not be overlooked is Kateřina Rudčenková (*1976), a poet and playwright. One play which stands out from her body of work for its quality is Niekur, for which she was awarded the 2006 Alfréd Radok Award. The play’s unusual title comes from Lithuanian and translates as “nowhere”. It refers to a chance love affair of restricted duration which takes place in a foreign land – i.e. “nowhere”. Another captivating piece of work is her poetry collection Chůze po dunách [Walking on Dunes], which was awarded the 2014 Magnesia Litera⁴⁰In 2003 she also received the Hubert Burda Award, a German prize for Eastern European poets, for her poetry..

Red Landscape

you go through a red landscape

through ferrous plains 

with the truth lodged in your subconscious

beside the bulbs of poisonous meadow saffron

you go into the distance

all the way to the ochre sea

on which they bob 

quite happily

towards a sea full of crimson strawberries

the size of windows

into the distance to red-hot infinity

—Walking on Dunes (Fra, 2013)

Another important woman on the Czech literary scene is the author of stage and radio plays Lenka Lagronová (*1963). Her play Terezka won the Alfréd Radok Award for play of the year in 1997. This work reflects the personal transformation of the author, who took monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that same year. Lenka Lagronová’s dramas have been staged both in the Czech Republic and abroad⁴¹Her plays have been published in English and Korean translations..

The novelist and scriptwriter Petra Soukupová (*1982) has won a number of major literary awards. She received the 2008 Jiří Orten Prize for her novel K moři [To the Seaside]. In it she examines an inability to communicate that can afflict even the closest family circle. In terms of style and ideas, the book has been compared to Virginia Woolf’s classic work To the Lighthouse. In 2010 she won the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year prize for the novel Zmizet [To Disappear]. Once again, this deals with the issue of family relations and the way in which momentary closeness quickly gives way to the habitual distance. Petra Soukupová has a wonderful talent for storytelling, through which she is able to make the reader reflect upon ostensibly undramatic events in life.

The writer, journalist and Hispanist Markéta Pilátová (*1973) has published in a variety of Czech media outlets and also writes song lyrics for the singer Monika Načeva. She earned success with her first very novel Žluté oči vedou domů [The Yellow Eyes Will Lead You Home] from 2007, which was nominated for a Magnesia Litera prize and the Josef Škvorecký Prize. The story is set in the world of Brazilian emigrants who start to loose their roots over time. Will they still find their way home? Markéta Pilátová’s books have been published in German, Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Portuguese translations.

The daughter of the famous writer and dissident Eda Kriseová, Magdaléna Platzová (*1972), has also made a name for herself within modern Czech literature. She is primarily a playwright, author of children’s books, and journalist. She has written for a number of important Czech media outlets and enjoyed great success with her stage plays Na útěku! [On the Run!] and Sayang⁴²The play On the Run! from 1999 progressed to the final of the Alfréd Radok Awards competition for the best Czech theatre play; the play Sayang from 2000 did the same a year later. The play was staged as a dramatized reading at the Theatre on the Balustrade.. Her books have been published in English, Dutch and German.

Magdalena Wagnerová (*1960) is the author of novels, screenplays and many children’s books⁴³She has been nominated for the Magnesia Litera prize and the Golden Ribbon for her charming story books.. Among other things, she wrote the screenplay for the feature film Saturnin. Her novel Papíří [Paper] from 2005, about a librarian who would like to fulfil his dreams, is remarkable and at times almost Kafkaesque.

Sometimes he wondered whether the library books understood why he was unfaithful to them. By the same token, he contemplated whether his own books would abandon him if he lingered in the library until late. But the paper was lenient. The library books graciously tolerated their leader’s weekends as long as he returned on Monday, while the books at home tolerated their ruler’s working days as long as he returned before midnight. That was the unwritten agreement.

—Paper (Dybbuk, 2005)

Comic-book literature also has an important female representative in the shape of Lucie Lomová (*1964). She was the winner of the 2011 Muriel comic-book prizes for best original screenplay and best original Czech comic for the graphic novel Divoši [Savages] and also for the best original book Anna chce skočit [Anna Wants to Jump]. The novel Divoši was first published in France and immediately met with a very positive response. It is no exaggeration to say that this, “the most extensive colour comic-book project since Saudek’s Muriel aims to become the most important Czech comic book abroad by employing a universal narrative technique without losing its quintessentially Czech poetic.”⁴⁴From a review by the editor Richard Klíčník for iLiteratura.

Petra Procházková (*1964) is a writer, journalist and humanitarian worker. She worked as a war correspondent. In 2000 she was presented with the Medal of Merit by President Václav Havel⁴⁵She has also been awarded the Mayor of the City of Pilsen’s prize for human rights (2000), the Quail Award (1999), the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize for journalism (1997) and the Gratias Agit award for promoting the good name of the Czech Republic abroad.. In her writing she primarily captures the lives of people in faraway war-torn countries. She touches upon the painful life stories of wives, mothers and daughters who have lost their loved ones to war. Her book Frišta [Freshta] about one family in Kabul has been translated into English and Polish.

Iva Procházková (*1953), the daughter of the well-known writer Jan Procházka, writes books for adults as well as children’s literature. Her books have been published in fifteen languages. She is also the recipient of many literary awards⁴⁶For her literary output she has received five Golden Ribbons and two Magnesia Literas in the category of books for childen and young adults. She was also awarded the most prestigious German prize for children’s books – the Friedrich Gerstäcker Award.. Among other things, she is the author of the dystopian prose work Tanec trosečníků [Dance of Castaways], published in 2006. In it the world is engulfed by a terrifying pandemic. Will love at least survive?

Love certainly will survive – on the pages of books, in our relationship to them and perhaps also within us. There are many more female writers who have left their mark on modern Czech literature, but how many of them can we store in our memory? How many books can pass through our hands in the space of one short life? Whether written by women or men, they perform a valuable service for many of us by holding up a mirror to life. Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude this overview of women’s writing with a quote from a man – a philosopher, who once said that “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”⁴⁷This philosopher is none other than Socrates.

Translated by Graeme Dibble

The Magnesia Litera occupies a special position in the Czech Republic. Of all the many literary awards in existence, the Litera is the best known and most widely recognised among the general public. This award “makes” writers – it guarantees them star status and increased sales. In the case of the Litera, it is a serious enterprise which has tangible, positive effects. The awards are divided into nine categories, which aim to cover all domestic book production. The jury for the individual categories is chosen from among professionally competent communities and organizations. In order to avoid overly narrow specialization, 300 people involved in the book trade (from university academics to librarians and booksellers) choose the winners in the categories Litera for Discovery of the Year and the Magnesia Litera – Book of the Year. The prize helps people to find their bearings in the sizeable book market. The prize also includes a financial reward of 200,000 CZK (€7,400) that comes with the main prize.

This is the fifteenth year of the Magnesia Litera, and to mark this occasion CzechLit has decided to make the Litera its feature of the month. We are bringing you a brief overview of this year’s winners, an interview with the main organizer, Pavel Mandys, and a selection of the best award-winning books from the past five years.

2016 – A Brief Overview

The Book of the Year was Daniela Hodrová’s Spiral Sentences. Spiral Sentences is an autobiographical novel about the narrator’s sensitively experienced friendship with the writer Bohumila Grögerová and the artist Adriena Šimotová. The Litera jury stated that: “As with the author’s previous books, this work also demonstrates great cultural erudition and an original artistic approach to the form of the novel. In keeping with the book’s title, her sentences develop richly and intertwine into a cyclical and layered story in which the present is permeated by memories, contemporary characters repeatedly encounter the dead, the world of myths is projected onto real events and places, everyday situations alternate with allegorical and dreamlike scenes, and seemingly ordinary things are imbued with symbolic meanings.” Spiral Sentences does not make for easy reading; however, it is all the more impressive for that. So much for the Book of the Year.

The category Litera for Prose was also won by a woman this year, namely Anna Bolavá with her debut novel Into Darkness. Bolavá is an excellent stylist who is able to maintain the narrative pace and keep the reader’s attention. The jury wrote of her book that: “It’s June, everything is in bloom, and Anna sets off into the surroundings on her old bike. The land around her house is full of medicinal herbs. Everything now has to be put aside: memories of her failed marriage, the curious death of her father-in-law, the loss of her job, her troublesome illness. The frantic pace of the harvest is not motivated by the base desire for income; the roots of Anna’s obsession go much deeper. The book has a strange tension; nothing is explicitly stated, so it is up to the reader to find the key. The reasons for the disaster which the main character/narrator is heading towards remain concealed within many portents and episodes.”

And Poetry? Ladislav Zedník was the winner this year with his outstanding collection A City in One Stone. The jury described the book as “the poetic testimony of an adult man, who without showing off and yet with an overview of geological periods, carefully examines his own period, his own life and the lives of his fellow man.”

A selection of the most interesting award-winning books from the past five years

Petr Stančík: Mummy Mill

Ondřej Horák & Jiří Franta: Why Paintings Don’t Need Names

Emil Hakl: A True Story

Kateřina Rudčenková: Walking on Dunes

David Böhm & Ondřej Buddeus: The Head in the Head

Zuzana Brabcová: Ceilings

Jakub Řehák: The Trap for Brigita

Kateřina Tučková: The Žítková Goddesses

Jiří Hájíček: Fish blood

Michal Ajvaz: Luxembourg Gardens

Jan Balabán: Ask Dad

Petr Stančík

Mummy Mill
Mlýn na mumie

(Druhé město, 400 pages)

The 2015 Prose winner. Fantasy and linguistic opulence, a post-historical detective novel from the second half of the 19th century. Using several levels of plot and meaning which mirror each other, Stančík narrates a story whose central theme is the relativity of punishment and the way it is carried out. “A very readable story about the hunt for a serial killer set against the backdrop of old Prague,” said the competition jury. Petr Stančík is a middle-generation author, a poet and prose writer, author of children’s books, playwright, advertising writer and essayist. As far as Mummy Mill is concerned, we are definitely talking about an international success; it is going to be translated into Polish, Spanish, Hungarian and Bulgarian.

Praise

“Stančík is simply enjoying himself. His novel is the kind of book that you want to take everywhere and quote enthusiastically from at every opportunity.”

— Boris Hokr, Aktualne.cz

Links

Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: druhemesto.cz

An excerpt can be found here.

Ondřej Horák & Jiří Franta

Why Paintings Don’t Need Names
Proč obrazy nepotřebují názvy

(Labyrint/Raketa, 96 pages)

One weekend Emma and Nick find out from their grandparents that the world “gallery” applies not only to contemporary shopping temples of consumerism, but also to friendly institutions, which accommodate children’s inherent need to ask, search and think. This Magnesia Litera and Golden Ribbon-winning book uses dialogue-based prose, interlaced with gripping comic-book sequences, to turn exhibition spaces into frolicsome playgrounds that help humanise the forbidding sphere of “modern art”. An experienced advocate of art has joined forces with a notable protagonist of the comic-book circles to create a lovably condensed literary form, combining debates on art-history with light parody and live broadcast of a burglary involving Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square. The book includes information summarising main artists, schools, approaches, painting techniques, as well as some of the best-known cases of art theft, giving older school children a better understanding of why an original, and the originality of an artist’s vision, mean so much to us. The jury added: “Ondřej Horák and Jiří Franta have eschewed pedantry and instead gambled on children’s natural desire to ask questions.”

Praise

“This book can be more informative for readers than many general introductory texts about art history or theory.”

— Klára Kubíčková, idnes.cz

Links

Publisher: www.labyrint.net

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

“Granny, how are paintings actually made?”

“It’s quite simple. Artists normally use canvas or paper. But it doesn’t really make any difference – you can use anything you can paint on. You also need to have something to paint with: brushes, paints, maybe an artist’s palette. But you know what? That’s not really important – for example, you can make a picture in the snow with your finger, on the wall with spray paint or on the pavement with chalk. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about what you create. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

“And what about that stand Grandpa has in the cellar?”

“An easel. And a straw hat on your head, paint all over your hands… You know, that’s more just a notion people have about how an artist should look. The truth is that you don’t even need an easel. You can just put the canvas on the ground or on a table. What I mean is: there’s no such thing as the correct equipment or correct appearance for an artist. I know a painter who looks like an office worker, and an office worker who looks like a painter. Just take a look at that painting.”

“That painting’s so big that I can’t look at anything else anyway.”

“Jackson Pollock placed the canvas on the floor, threw away his paintbrush and poured the paint on straight from the tin. He created totally new works of art which continue to fascinate people today, and he didn’t need to have a beret on his head, or a palette, brushes or an easel.”

“That’s cool. But I’m afraid that when I move on from this painting to the next one I’ll forget about it. That after a while I won’t even remember that I saw it and how much I liked it.”

“It only seems that way to you. Powerful things remain inside you forever. And some works of art have that power. You have them inside you and they affect you without you even knowing about it. For the whole of your life.”

“Do you have them inside you?”

“Of course. But don’t think about it as if it was a roll inside your stomach.”

“Hmm, I don’t know, maybe there isn’t enough room inside me,” laughed Mikuláš, and he ran over to the handrail from which you could look down on the floor below and the whole of the gallery.

“You have to believe in it all at least a little bit, as a wise man once said,” added Granny.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Emil Hakl

A True Story
Skutečná událost

(Argo, 190 pages)

Hakl is a Czech literary celebrity, best known for his novel Of Kids and Parents, published in ten languages, with a successful film also based on the book. A True Story matches up to the aforementioned book in terms of quality. It mixes snippets from the history of the German RAF with contemporary Czech decadence, an existential thriller with a love story, and grey optimism with black reality. The jury said of the book: “Into the life of a fifty-year-old, dragged down by a safe but dull office job, comes a new woman – and also a new interest in the history of the German RAF. The two central motifs, at least one of which is based on reality, merge and support each other, and from them the author weaves a simple but incredibly powerful story about the moment when an individual finally decides to act.” It has been published in German and Dutch, and a Slovenian edition is in the pipeline. A clear success!

Praise

“Hakl brilliantly describes the world of men who are wasting their lives away.”

— Klára Kubíčková, idnes.cz

Links

Author website: www.emilhakl.cz
Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: www.argo.cz

Excerpt ▼

The following evening, a cautious knock on the door. Behind it Evžen, closely followed by a tall, long-haired beanpole, bearded and wide-eyed.

Evžen introduces him, “My colleague – a virologist,” sticking out his tongue and pulling a face like a moron, which with him is a sign that he’s ill at ease.

“Could we listen to something at your place?” asks the virologist.

“Why not.”

They sit down by the monitor. No ‘how are you, what’s new’. Straight to the point. Click, click.

The screen fills with a diva plastered in morbid-looking make-up. The notes she’s emitting are hard to describe.

“Those aren’t vocal chords – they’re a grinding machine,” says Evžen’s colleague delightedly. “Oh, yeah! And another thing I didn’t know – in 1977 the paleontologists Adrian and Edgecombe named a group of extinct trilobites after the members of the band: Arcticalymene rotteni, A. Viciousi, A. Matlocki, A. Cooki.”

“I don’t know anything. I don’t watch anything,” counters Evžen. “Last night I put on, er, a classic, Dařbuján and Pandrhola – that’s the kind of crazy fucker I am.”

“Come on, it’s one of the greats.”

“For me it was more about killing time. But I noticed: a – Pandrhola has red hair, b – the evil grain merchant Bašta also has red hair and c – the stuttering doctor who always wants his money up front, otherwise he won’t come, is a bit ginger too. All of the horrible characters are redheads – why is that?

“It makes sense. For two or three hundred years, better-off families would marry among themselves to keep their property together. It started off in the country and then the youngsters went to the towns and immediately got used to life there. That’s why it looks the way it does here. Almost every one of us has an unfortunate gene.”

After that they just silently drink in Diamanda. That’s the creature’s name.

I can’t make them out at all. They know each other from school, from some party. That fiend and Evžen – what can they have in common? Evžen cultivates the hard man image, he likes thrash metal, but other than that he hardly ever drinks, he doesn’t smoke, he’s all about family. He likes to read Ajvaz while drinking tea in the garden. Actually, I guess they took his garden away from him along with the house.

Diamanda produces some screeching which you’d have thought wasn’t human. A belligerent, psychotic shriek.

After an hour I get up. “Guys, I’m off to bed,” I tell them. “There are mattresses and sleeping bags in the cupboard. Tea and coffee are over there, the sugar’s on the table, help yourself to anything in the fridge. Want any alcohol?”

“No alcohol, thanks. Definitely not.”

So you’ve got something, you swine, and you didn’t offer me any. I might not have wanted it anyway, but you could at least have offered.

“I just need to save something,” I say.

“Save away.”

I drop the retching singer into the system tray and back up my files.

They watch me carefully. Evžen giggles in a way that’s typical of him – even he doesn’t know where the funny, clever guy ends and the total arsehole begins. It’s the same with me sometimes – the extrovert wants out and doesn’t know how.

“You’re a total god, the way you’re doing that,” comments the oddball.

When I wake up I can hear a lively discussion next door. “You’ve never been? Never? You have to go there for at least three weeks. Just wander around staring at everything – there’s no way you’ll be bored. Where else in the centre of a city can you see a boar farm, a twisted, rusted factory that hasn’t changed since the last air raid, and a Gothic church occupied by dignified hippies in their sixties trying to be creative but failing because rheumatism and THC have taken their toll. And next to them is a house full of underage anarchists, stinking, gobs of spit everywhere, and their totally vulgar girlfriends.”

“Curty dunts.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to go there. Two doors up there’s a nice little bistro full of eighty-year-old grannies with lace collars – you can chat to them about anything, surprisingly they still have a brain in their head and they’re interested in the world. Of course, it’s normal people who are the most interesting, not those zoological ones, though it’s not so easy to get to them. Not that it’s impossible. You’ve just got to be patient.”

“I’m not, though.”

“You should still go. If you’re coming back by train, take the S-bahn. From a distance you’ll see an unbelievably huge glass ant hill towering above the roofs.”

“I was supposed to have gone for a month, cuntfuck, but I hate always having to push myself forward, trying to get a grant. It’s bad enough that I have to see those grovellers every day.”

“The funny thing is that you can already pick out those types in the first year of primary school. You can see clearly who’s going to spend their whole life in clover and who’ll be in the shit.”

“The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen was my class teacher at primary school. She had a body like one of those Russian women snipers, hairy armpits… Her name was Rotuše Caltová. When I was falling asleep, I used to have visions of her breastfeeding me, interrogating me and stuff. What ant hill?”

“The Hauptbahnhof. The trains go there along suspended tracks, you go in, you get off. You think you’re in a train station – bullshit, you’re in a shopping centre. Floors and floors of escalators, galleries, one shop next to another. You eat a herring baguette, you gradually go down lower and lower until you reach the bottom. Then you’re in the train station. Aseptically clean platforms, silence…”

I open the door. The same situation. Diamanda is demonstrating the wreckage of her vocal chords.

“She’s chirping like a cicada,” I say and put the kettle on. “Have you been sitting watching this all night?”

“We’ve had enough of her,” confesses the dishevelled fiend. “We’ve been sitting on the floor drinking coffee. We’re not getting in your way, are we?”

Evžen dangles a mug from his tattooed hand, examines the bottom for coffee grounds and smiles ambiguously.

On the table there are 15 empty cups.

Among them is an open tin half-filled with roughly pressed golden-brown pills. They look homemade. They exude a rustic charm. So it’s like that, you fuckers.

I inconspicuously swipe a few of them.

“Time to go,” they get up as if on command. “We’re off. Thanks for the coffee and the digs. Your coffee’s great.”

“Sorry,” says Evžen, “I don’t think I introduced my colleague. We were a bit spun out yesterday. This is Pitvor. I’ll write to you from the fucking corporation. You’ve no idea how those normal emails, where we don’t actually say anything to each other, keep me going.”

His colleague offers me his bony shovel of a hand.

“Pitvor,” he says, “My nickname from nursery.”

“How come you’re colleagues when you both work in different places?”

“It’s not our work that connects us, it’s what we do in our free time.”

And they’re gone.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Kateřina Rudčenková

Walking on Dunes
Chůze po dunách

(Fra, 74 pages)

The winner in the Poetry category. This anthology by Kateřina Rudčenkova (1976) brings together poems from 2008–2011. Eroticism, sensuality, anxiety and loneliness – the ancient themes of poets’ discourse and conversations with the world – sound even more heart-rending and spellbinding in these verses. The book concludes with a captivating cycle of poetry written on the beaches of the Baltic Sahara, among the dunes, in an evocative landscape of deserted grassy plains where one feels as if one is experiencing the end of the world, cosmically and nostalgically. To quote from the jury’s statement: “The poet observes and describes – often so aptly that it sends shivers through the reader… Walking on the Dunes stands up to repeated reading, focusing on the individual layers which naturally intermingle and enlighten one another.” German translations of Kateřina Rudčenková’s poems can be found on the Lyrikline website, and Rudčenková’s earlier collection You don’t have to visit me has been published in German.

Praise

“This new book by the acclaimed poet Kateřina Rudčenková is without a doubt a long-awaited event… As if the moderation of the author’s convictions went hand in hand with a moderation of expression.”

— Michal Alexa, iLiteratura

Links

Author website: rudcenkova.freehostia.com
Publisher: www.fra.cz

David Böhm & Ondřej Buddeus

The Head in the Head
Hlava v hlavě

(Labyrint, 145 pages)

The 2014 Magnesia Litera in the category of Books for Children and Young Adults as well as the 2014 Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year, followed by the Golden Ribbon in the category of Literature for Children and Young Adults. Few books have received so many accolades. So what’s it about? It’s about the head. The head – that round thing between our ears? Ah, but there’s a lot more to it than that. According to the authors, the head is quite fascinating – it tells us what there is to see and hear, what something smells or tastes like. The head is the management centre of the body because our brain remembers everything – who I am, who you are, and how we can reach each other when we want to put our heads together. In short, the head is the most important part of the body, and the more you look into it, the more you realize that you need at least a small encylopedia to describe everything that is in it and connected to it. The Head in the Head is an unusual and original publication, the first Czech “headopedia”, aimed principally at child readers, which uses an imaginative and playful visual format to help them grasp the basic facts about the head, the brain, and how they work. The result is a visually inventive and poetic book combining humour, fun and information, in which children’s inquisitive questions are answered by, among others, a neurologist, a boxer and a detective. The jury said of the book that: “It is a work which blurs the boundaries of age – similar publications usually boast that they are intended for 9- to 99-year-olds.” A German edition is in the pipeline.

Praise

“The authors have created a book which offers much more than just a few observations about the head and how it works. In 120 pages it demonstrates how it is possible to work with a book as an object. Böhm conceived each page in a completely different way. Sometimes he used simple comic-book-style illustrations; elsewhere he cut out an opening to the next page and Buddeus filled it with stories.”

— Judita Matyášová, Lidové noviny

Links

Publisher: www.labyrint.net

Illustrations

Excerpt ▼

THE GIRL WITH A FLASH DRIVE

How Much Can Fit into Your Head?

No-one has yet built a computer which can store as much information as your head does. The human memory is enormous. If someone has an excellent memory, they are not only good at storing but also at recalling information. There are several different types of memory. We have a short-term memory for things that we won’t need to remember the next day. When we are crossing the road, we only need to keep the fact that the green man is lit up in our memory for a few seconds. However, there are some things that we have to remember for a much longer time. Our medium-term memory is used to store information that we will need for a certain period of time, for example at school. We also have a long-term memory for things that we will need to know all our life.

What is the point of forgetting?

So that we feel happy when we remember something again.

How do we memorize something and how do we recall it?

The memory has two important helpers. One of these is our experiences, for which a special structure in the brain called the limbic system is responsible. It recognizes what is pleasant and unpleasant for us and what makes us happy or sad. An experience helps us to remember an event and everything connected with it. It then affects the way we behave in the future. Memory’s other helper is our imagination. There are many different techniques to make it easier to remember something. They all have one thing in common: they teach us how to create a link between what is difficult to remember and what is easy to remember. If you form a surprising, funny or crazy image of the thing you want to remember, then you won’t be able to get it out of your head.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Zuzana Brabcová

Ceilings
Stropy

(Druhé město, 200 pages)

Winner in the category of Prose. This novel was the last to be published in her lifetime by the late author of Year of Pearls, an extraordinary novel with an extraordinary theme (one of the first Czech novels to openly describe lesbian relationships). Year of Pearls has been translated into several languages, and Ceilings, which deserves a similar fate, has so far been published in Egypt. The inner drama takes place at a psychiatric asylum; “detox” becomes a place of human relations exposed, a place of torturous questions and answers, a place of life traumas into which the outer world intrudes as an exacerbating element. In an at times fantastic narrative, the so-called real and dream world blend into one, as do the character’s inner feelings and ostensibly objective picture of their lives. The jury said of the novel: “What appeals to readers most is not even the stylistic brilliance. It is perhaps the persistent deliberation upon the fate of a disparate group of sick women through which the author offers us an insight into our equally disparate present. The novel Ceilings seems to confirm the age-old rule that, paradoxically, the more specific a novel is, the more it touches us.” We have to agree.

Praise

“Zuzana Brabcová’s novel is a literary event, a work on the fringes which is extraordinary in its condensed and poetic style. It is, at least for me, the literary event of the past year and beyond.”

— Petr. A Bílek, Respekt

Links

Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: druhemesto.cz

Excerpt ▼

“Where are you taking me?”

The female nude sprawling in her mass of red hair does not even move. The person has stopped speaking dialect and is once more staring silently at the street in front of him. But then he started yawning so much that the young woman who had been lying down sat up sharply and turned slightly green. Maybe it was because she had been slowly sipping iced mojito. But she had ordered the drink herself! She is sitting with her mother in the cubist café and the waiter is setting two glasses and a cream cake on a little plate in front of them. Naturally, the cream cake is square-shaped – it is a cubist café, after all. Behind the grand piano sits a pianist, and even from here you can hear his joints crack as he wearily runs his fingers over the keys.

“I wanted to talk to you, and now this…” says her mum as the first chords thunder. And I, free of tattoos, sip my mojito and smile because: “Mum, do you hear what he’s playing?” And the worn-out pianist’s voice sentimentally croaks:

Dark eyes, passionate eyes,
Burning and splendid eyes
How I love you so, how I fear you…
Verily, I espied you in an ill-starred moment

And Mum doesn’t believe that it’s just a coincidence, that I hadn’t requested the song from the pianist, and contentedly sinks the spoon into the cream cake…

“Where are you taking me?” She doesn’t shout. She harnesses the roar. She subdues her tone so that she can have a completely ordinary, matter-of-fact, more or less polite conversation between two people. But the ambulanceman was silent. He had even stopped telling jokes about gypsies and poofs to his colleague behind the wheel.

All of a sudden the ambulance stops. A door slammed. For a long time nothing happens.

I dream, though perhaps not about mojito, I wouldn’t dare: they’re going to get me some water to drink. After all, they’re not transporting a thing. A piece of sandstone in slippers. Somewhere in the toilet by the pump they fill a plastic bottle with water and get themselves coffee from a machine, the driver with sugar, the ambulanceman without, and a filled baguette and bacon-flavoured crackers. And now a geyser is gushing from the roadway in front of a car. The cloud bursts above the city and a stream of water goes straight into my mouth. Down at Můstek, three fat, smiling, chattering old Italians lean over to drink on a hot summer’s day, 16 July at 1.15pm in the year 2008. Or some other time? Does it matter?

I place my palms under a gushing spring somewhere high in the mountains – you are with me; I follow your bent, girlish, delicate back and your firm, non-girlish step which says: Christ, stop lazing about all the time in bed with your depression and get up and walk, go, stride, plod, march, slog through the countryside and scramble your way up the hill and run down the hill, breathe deeply, like Mum used to tell you when you were a young girl, Jesus, you’re breathing like you were giving birth, you have to breathe deeply!, inhale the fragrance, look at what’s rustling behind that tree, an animal or a rock, over there’s a dilapidated hide and underneath it is a boletus mushroom, when was the last time you found a real white boletus?, and the wind in the trees and cobwebs between your fingers, and on your shoulder a mosquito sits in a drop of your blood.

And you let me drink from your cupped palm – not much of a success, I just get a wet face. We still have ten kilometres ahead of us and my feet are covered in blisters. Suddenly, down in the valley below us, the landscape forms a dome, glowing in the setting sun. I embrace you as if it were for the last time. Where is that moment? Who could find it in my body, now as stiff as a statue? Where is that moment…who could find it…and your tongue in my mouth, the taste of blackberries, your saliva, life.

Finally. The redhead opened the door and banged it shut again. A man in a leather jacket slid into the seat beside her. Thick plastic glasses jutted out from his face. He looked a bit like Andy Warhol.

“Do you have anything to drink? I’m terribly thirsty,” she whispered when they started off again.

He barely glanced at her. He probably just registered with indifference the sedated monument with purple slippers on whose belly a knapsack had lain since the year dot. In her haste she hadn’t been able to find anything else in the box from Popel. He averted his gaze and didn’t say a word.

Wherever they’re taking me, Rybka, I’ll make up for what I’ve done to you: I’ll roam the hospital corridors and let them shove a hosepipe into my bowels and at night I’ll cover myself up with the mumbling of sick old people and their children by their stinking beds, children sickened by the time wasted in the disgusting hospital stench, I’ll let it all into my head as penance for the unfathomable babbling of the world and the rasping shriek of goblins.

Behold, just see how I come into the prison courtyard, dizzy and tired, and dribble sauce from a mess tin onto my sweatshirt, and how the hungry hands of thieves grope me at night; I throw myself into prayers, as cold as the river Vltava in January, or I will be forever immobilized in a bubble of silence; and then, thrusting, lying down and standing up, standing up and lying down, I walk round Mount Kailash, above which circle vultures and at the foot of which your grandfather wanted to be chopped up when he dies.

Anywhere, just not to the Garden.

And once again they’re rattling their way through the city over the cobbles, over the asphalt, and they stop at the traffic lights. At one point Ema turns onto her side, as far as the straps will allow, and vomits. She vomits under Andy Warhol’s feet. A small jellyfish glistens on the ambulance floor, a cartoon bubble that they forgot to write text in.

“Do you want to play Chinese Whispers with me,” she asks. But Andy doesn’t understand. How could he? It’s impossible to play Chinese Whispers with only two people. And so she starts to play by herself, she whispers and mutters, stutters and then passes it on, and then it suddenly hits her, what if at least once in this game it was the other way round – what if in the end a clear word formed from what had started off as a piece of nonsense: for example –

Garden. She can see it wildly pulsating, as if they had just created it a second ago, that mockery of symmetry, the monstrous cosmos split into a triptych. Around a well, into which clusters of dead birds rain down, naked riders on pigs gallop through a dark landscape shot through with flashes of light; the pope-devil on a magnificent throne devours and then immediately throws up the damned and at that moment there is dancing to hellish music and a goblin with a drum in which an infant is trapped, and over here scorpions and a man crucified on a harp, and over there two ears joined by a needle, from which the handle of a knife sticks out.

“The pope-devil there is devouring…” The glasses turned round to her inquisitively. “Do you know where they’re taking us? Do you have anything to drink?” And surprisingly Andy Warhol says something. “I’ve no idea. I imagine you’re cold.” And Andy Warhol takes off his leather jacket and covers her up to her chin with it.

The ambulanceman says something into the radio. Only then did she realize that the siren wasn’t switched on. Fortunately neither she nor Warhol were at all important. Not acute cases. She should have tried to leave the emergency room at Motol on her own, leave an empty wetsuit there in her place, swim home and fall asleep, without any tablets this time, sleep for twenty-four hours and then wake up, open the blinds and go to work and have lunch with Rybka and light candles in the evening, and put on Nico and wait for Dita to call… And talk to her and laugh and then make love at night. Wake up. Open the blinds. Go to work. Call Rybka, invite Mum for a mojito and a cubist cream cake at the café. Simply keep moving in the safe womb of everydayness.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Jakub Řehák

The Trap for Brigita
Past na Brigitu

(Fra, 80 pages)

Winner in the poetry category (2013). Jakub Řehák was born in Uherské Hradiště in 1978, graduated from the post-secondary film school in Zlín and now works in the Municipal Library in Prague. Besides poetry, he also writes essays. He builds on the avant-garde of the First Czechoslovak Republic, particularly the legacy of surrealism that he brings up to date in an original way both through a distinctive vision of cinematic editing and through a captivating expression derived from the Apollinairian concept of a poem as an unbound ‘zone’. Brigita, the titular character of the book, is not only a specific girl, the poet’s lost lover, but also a common, slowly uncovered feminine principle. The jury said that: “Řehák’s poetry is a gripping stream emanating from a confident poetic gesture through which the poet recasts raw ‘signs of the times’ into an unsettling and purely contemporary myth.”

Praise

“This is poetry which opens up gradually, which one enters into in a roundabout way. Poetry which knows how to snap its trap shut even when it is read repeatedly – and each time with the help of a different lure.”

— Markéta Kittlová, iLiteratura

Links

Publisher: www.fra.cz

Kateřina Tučková

The Žítková Goddesses
Žítkovské bohyně

(Host, 456 pages)

Kateřina Tučková is an art historian, translator and writer who has been very well received by Czech readers over the past decade. Her best known novel, The Žítková Goddesses, sold over 110,000 copies, won four Czech awards including the Magnesia Litera Readers’ award and has been translated into many languages including German and Polish. The novel is a fascinating tale of the female soul, magic and a part of Czech history kept hidden. A group of mysterious woman, known as goddesses, have lived high up in the White Carpathian Mountains. They are far away from everything, which is why it is said that certain women among them have succeeded in preserving knowledge and intuition the rest of us have lost. They have passed this knowledge down from generation to generation for centuries. Dora Idesová is the last of the goddesses. She is reluctant to accept an outdated way of life and to read the futures of those who come to her in drips of wax, as her Aunt Surmena did. But everything changes once she understands that her personal circumstances that she has always considered unhappy – being sent to a boarding school and hospitalization in an asylum – is part of a carefully thought-out plan. It is the late 1990s, and in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior there is a file awaiting discovery – a file compiled by the State Security police on an enemy of the state, her Aunt Surmena. A disbelieving Dora begins to untangle details of the previously unknown fates of her family and other goddesses…

Praise

“A brilliant mix of fact and fiction.”

— Der Standard

Links

Author website: www.katerina-tuckova.cz
Foreign rights: www.dbagency.cz
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

An excerpt can be found here.

Jiří Hájíček

Fish blood
Rybí krev

(Host, 360 pages)

Hájíček is from South Bohemia. In Hájíček’s case it is worth mentioning this geographical location – not because he is an author of purely local significance (on the contrary – Hájíček is one of the Czech Republic’s finest), but due to the fact that he uses this setting as a theme in his books. He has won two Literas: the first for Rustic Baroque, which has also been published in English: however, we wish to draw attention to his other prize-winning book. In 2008 Hana returns home to the village she grew up in after 15 years abroad. But the place she had imagined settling in, marrying and working as a schoolteacher has become a virtual ghost town. The story revolves around the building of the Temelín nuclear power station, which involved clearing several villages. Their displacement severed old ties and roots. Seeing her father, brother and childhood friends Hana takes a searching look back and tries to heal old wounds. The jury stated that: “A power station and the residents’ futile struggle against it becomes the backdrop to dramatic interpersonal relationships and stories of ordinary people in unusual circumstances, narrated in a traditional manner. The author describes the plot and characters vividly and convincingly, creating a high-quality work of literature through his simple style.” It has been published in Polish, Hungarian, Belorussian and Bulgarian.

Praise

“With Fish Blood Hájíček has become a master of intimate drama. The ordinary and everyday are vivid in their effect; the blend of detail is altogether plausible. At the same time the author’s informal style – no strained metaphor or affected layering of semantic imagery as freed by the postmodern imperative – always succeeds in creating the right atmosphere. ”

— Eva Klíčová, Host

Links

Author website: www.hajicek.info
Foreign rights: www.dbagency.cz
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

An excerpt can be found here.

Michal Ajvaz

Luxembourg Gardens
Lucemburská zahrada

(Druhé město, 176 pages)

Ajvaz is a poet and novelist whose books can be classified as playful literary fantasy filled with symbols. His books are regularly published abroad and have been translated into English. The French translation of Ajvaz’s The Other City was awarded the Utopiales prize for science fiction. The novel we have selected was awarded the Litera for Book of the Year, and also contains elements of science fiction. The Luxembourg Gardens describes a sequence of events experienced by Parisian secondary-school teacher Paul in the summer holidays. In an absent-minded moment he hits the wrong key on his computer keyboard and misspells a single word; as a result, he spends the happiest and most terrible period of his life. The action of the novel is set in Paris, Nice, Nantes, New York State, Moscow, the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Taormina in Sicily, and Lara, a town of the author’s invention. It has already been published in Russia and Croatia, and preparations are underway for a Bulgarian edition. The jury stated that: “The author manages to do something simple yet quite remarkable: he perceives his mother tongue differently, as if from the outside, and penetrates into its very essence. He sees its hitherto unnoticed, miraculous qualities; he senses its melodies and hues. This idiosyncratic linguistic obsession leads to knowledge. The novella is not as sophisticated as Ajvaz’s previous books – with one difference: there is a sophistication here in the intermingling of subtle prose with elements more typical of lower forms of literature.”

Praise

“In his latest novel, Michal Ajvaz has ingeniously built up an incredibly imaginative web of stories which connect up, cross over and influence each other.”

— Markéta Kittlová, iLiteratura

Links

Foreign rights: www.dbagency.cz
Publisher: druhemesto.cz

An excerpt can be found here.

Jan Balabán

Ask Dad
Zeptej se táty

(Host, 192 pages)

This novelist and translator is one of the best and most popular writers of the past two decades. His most highly acclaimed work, We Might be Going, was named Book of the Decade in the Magnesia Litera competition. The book we have chosen won Book of the Year in the same competition, as well as the Lidové noviny newspaper’s Book of the Year and Respekt magazine’s Book of the Year. The crux of Jan Balabán’s novel focuses on dying and death even though its inherent plot centers on the painstaking pursuit of life, which first has to be found in its depth or reinvented. In a sense, we are all somehow similar to the characters of this extraordinary, vibrant story replete with dialogue, soliloquy and silence. A story which searches for truth only to find sincerity. In our temporal existence, we are trying to discover something about the quintessence of actuality or be near – at least momentarily – to something substantial. It has been published in Sweden and Poland, and Bulgarian and Serbian editions are in the pipeline. The jury stated that: “Balabán’s latest, almost chilling, novel is an incredibly honest account of life in extremis.”

Praise

“Ask Dad, which Jan Balabán spent the last three years of his life working on, is the essence of his writing: it is autobiographical, harrowing and depressing. It tries to come to terms with the past and the future. It is gripping, economical and authentic.”

— Kateřina Kadlecová, Reflex

Links

Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

Excerpt ▼

Get up early. Outside the window the blue ink of a night already fractured into day. It happened just a short while ago. How I’d like to be there again some time to witness our terrestrial floe passing out of the realm of night. Seeing this means not going to bed at all. Sitting by the fireside all night. Occasionally throwing on another log. Occasionally uttering a few words and then just wearily observing the darkness growing thinner among the trees. The grey of the trunks transforming into the first hint of colour, blue smoke from the fire, and then you look around and everything is naked in the first light of day.

Sometimes you can’t sleep. But insomnia isn’t the same as being awake. It is a horizontal neurosis. A torturous kind of hoping. An urgent expectation that at this very second of waiting for sleep, the longed-for sleep will come. That second stretches out into an unbearably long, unbroken period of time. Like the moon tonight. It stole into the window pane from the left-hand side an hour after midnight and slowly made its way across it in a descending, flattish arc until five in the morning, when it disappeared beyond the right-hand window frame. If I had been asleep, I wouldn’t have seen it at all. If I had stayed awake and looked up from my work or my book from time to time, I would have seen its disc at various points along its path. But insomnia drew its entire course out for me like the trail of a silver slug upon dark glass. For an undivided five-hour-long instant it showed me how the world smudges into blurs and the universe into slug trails when a moment cannot come to an end.

Hans thought of his father, who suffered from insomnia during the last few years of his life. The stress of the hospital, of the pale, sickly faces and the fates of people dependent on machines. Later came his own cardiac arrhythmia, prostate and above all anxiety. Whether Kateřina would ever overcome her illness, whether his two boys, Hans and Emil, would make something of themselves or would squander their abilities and drink themselves stupid, as now seemed likely. Whether his wife Marta would be happy one day or would just have to go on and on putting up with things. Whether this whole life that we crawl through like soldiers in the mud under barbed wire was futile. Whether this burning and cramping up would one day pass. And whether we would ever meet our parents and brothers again, whether we would be united, at least through our destiny, at least through the same love at various times, until time ceases to exist. Is there a fellowship of the living and the dead, as children have been told so many times? Or is life just burning and cramping up, just a meaningless blur, the trail of our spiritual and biological decline?

And so Hans got up early. He just threw a sweater over his pyjamas, slipped his bare feet into his shoes, let the dog out and went to take a leak on the field in front of the hut. I’ll go round the corner and I’ll see it among the boughs of the fruit trees, big, much bigger than in the night, and white like a temporal bone. A perfect circle. No, it isn’t perfect, it’s already waning and it’s flattened on one side, which makes it look all the more like the human skull that my brother Emil showed me sticking up out of the ground from a dug-up grave in the town cemetery. At the time Emil was working there as a labourer. If he couldn’t study, he could at least come up with a bizarre manual occupation for himself. Sleep, he said then, contemplating the skull through narrowed eyes, is a landscape of its own. Then he handed the skull over to the gravedigger, who wrapped it in a black rag along with the other remains of the grave’s previous occupant and laid them to one side.

Hans went into the hut. He threw a handful of kindling onto the last glowing coals in the stove. It roared cosily for the first time since evening. He put water on for coffee and went to take another look at the moon in the branches of the fruit trees, at that image which would be so difficult to paint with all the connotations it had now. It was even bigger, closer to the horizon and much paler. It was dissolving in the early morning like a sugar cube.

Am I a sleepwalker? Hans asked himself, gazing in fascination at the temporal bone among the leafless boughs and moving back through the tunnel of time. A few years ago at six o’clock in the morning the same bone had been hanging among the antennae on the roofs of the blocks of flats by the hospital. He had only noticed it when he switched off the car lights in the car park in front of the main entrance. He had come for his dad, who had called his mum to say that he had started to feel unwell while he was on night duty, that she shouldn’t worry, that he would just go for some kind of examination in the morning to rule something out. And his mum had immediately called Hans and asked him to go and collect him, because she often had hunches which were regularly proved right, and so Hans went immediately.

He looked at the moon impaled on an antenna and asked whether it was a good or bad omen. Was he here too early, or had his dad been delayed? He hadn’t. He was walking slowly alongside the wall, with one hand on it for support and the other clutching his stomach. It was really him. Now he had both hands on the wall, as if he was afraid that he would fall, and in this cautious way he proceeded by sidestepping along the length of the wall towards the main entrance. He was on his way back from somewhere, probably from a futile attempt to get somewhere by himself. The early-morning walkers cast disapproving looks at him. They thought he was drunk. Hans ran up to him and supported him.

Dad, what’s going on?

I seem to have got a bit mixed up, lad. I wanted to go home, or to neurology or somewhere, but now I’m wandering around in circles. I imagine I’ve had some kind of episode. Some kind of minor stroke. After that people get confused like this.

Where do you want to go? Should I take you to neurology, or home?

Home? All the future events of his life were contained in the look he gave me. We can’t go home like this. I have to go to the hospital.

But you’ve finished your shift. I’ve come to get you.

I know. You’re a good lad. But you know, son, I need to go to the hospital now, not as a doctor, but as a patient. First I need to go to neurology. It was probably an ictus. Take me to Dr Skála on the second floor. You know him, Petr Skála. He’s got the same first name and surname.

How’s that?

Peter, you are my rock. Skála – rock. That’s what I meant – from the Bible, you know?

Of course I know.

So take me to him and he’ll check me over. And then we’ll go through all the steps until we figure it out. First we have to rule out…

The mournful expression that my father had had in his eyes at the mention of home was gone. Dr Nedoma had begun to matter-of-factly review the case of a patient who happened to be he himself. And, supported by his son, he walked as a patient through the doorway from which he had emerged as a doctor for the last time a short while before.

Someone tugged at Hans’s sleeve. Hans opened his eyes. It was a dog. As if to say: Don’t sleep. The kettle on the stove had almost boiled dry. Dark sky beyond the window, just a light streak above the horizon. Was it evening, or morning? At that moment you couldn’t tell. It would depend on what came next. Then that arrow would appear, that accursed vector of time. The way it did then, in the moment between the doctor and the patient. Not even they could remain standing in that doorway for ever.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

When I was in charge of the MF DNES Brno regional supplement, I tried to apply the same criteria of journalistic relevance to culture as I did to other fields of human activity. This resulted in animosity from those cultural circles whose space was thus confined, and words of praise from those who did not wish those circles well. Quite often it was the other way round the following week.

I began writing poetry in a notebook that I gave girls to read. I didn’t get into samizdat, because I didn’t know the pubs that the samizdat writers went to. And instead of Prague I went down to the Oslava with my haversack. Then came the Velvet Revolution and I started giving vent to my journalistic ambitions by hawking a student newspaper. When it actually published my topical poem on Ivan Blatný’s death, I was happy and thought I couldn’t get any further with literature. I only recently rediscovered that newspaper and the poem.

When they told us at the Lidové noviny Brno editorial office in the mid 1990s that they were going to fire us in six months’ time for organizational reasons (which was by no means such a routine affair as it is these days), a few of us colleagues remembered that we were still poets. In those days before we wrote poetry in Brno we fondled stones from Vysočina and sniffed Kunštát clay beneath a crucifix, so we didn’t even take our poems to a publisher and we set up Almanach Vítrholc, where we published them. A friend printed them out and we started to go around the pubs and clubs to read them out, which we still do to this day.

We published several almanachs and invited hordes of girls to our events. Our reputation in Brno got to such a level that two friends who had worked their way up from theatre cloakroom attendants to theatrical publishers offered to publish my collection. I called it Zapalte Prahu (Set Prague on Fire) and included my poem Mrdat sekretářky (Fuck Secretaries). Regional acclaim was guaranteed. A literary critic who had worked his way up to be mayor wrote that I did it well and I’m interesting. I thought I couldn’t get any further with literature. Nobody from Host, Petrov and the neighbouring cafes was talking to me yet.

These people only started talking to me after I started to meet up with them early in the morning at a particular Brno pub called Poslední leč. When they found out that under the right climatic conditions what they told me over a beer could have an effect on the local supplement of the most prestigious daily, I became a part of the cultural scene.

Since that time nine Vítrholc Almanachs have come out as well as five of my own collections. I am so well established on the literary scene that not a single review has come out on the last one in the eleven months since it was published. Only Ivan Wernisch has possibly managed anything like that so far.

As I have felt rather down on the literary scene for quite some time now and I feel all on my own, in February 2014 I set up and started to run a website called Nedělní chvilka poezie (Sunday Poetry Time), where every Sunday at 8 pm I publish texts by a particular poet. I do enjoy this work, I like it and five minutes before I die I’d like to received a medal for it for my contribution to the development of literature in our region. I very much look forward to working for CzechLit. As I am writing this column, I am saying to myself that I cannot get any further with this literature. And I would just like to add that I have never asked for a literary grant.

It’s hard to provide an account of the literary connections between any two countries during the 20th and the early 21st century in the restricted space of just a few pages.⁴⁸This text refers to selected works by Jewish authors born in Czechoslovakia, resident at least for some time or actually living in Palestine or Israel during the 20th and 21st centuries, i.e. works in Czech, German or Hebrew, as well as works translated from Czech into Hebrew, and it also deals with the general issue of translating Czech literature into Hebrew, as well as its status in Israel. Opposing areas of interest which this text does not deal with include in particular what is known as Prague German literature (Franz Kafka), the diary literature of Jews from Czechoslovakia written in various languages in concentration camps and ghettos (Egon Redlich), the memoir literature of Jewish survivors from Czechoslovakia published in various countries and languages (Helga Weissová-Hošková), the first, second and third wave of postwar literature written in Czech and published in Czechoslovakia (Norbert Frýd), contemporary Jewish literature published in the Czech Republic (Benjamin Kuras) and translations of Czech literature into Arabic. It’s all the more challenging in the case of Czech-Israeli links as we move across a constantly reforming terrain in the territorial, national and linguistic sense. Czechoslovakia rose out of the ruins of Austria-Hungary after the First World War, when it was a national conglomerate made up primarily of Czechs, Germans, Ruthenians and Jews. After the Second World War it lost Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia for good, along with the majority of surviving Jews, while the Germans were expelled. Subsequently the Czech Republic emerged, or rather was left from the ruins of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Israel was established on the territory of Palestine, which had been governed until the end of the First World War by the Ottoman Empire and administered by Great Britain until 1948, as a Jewish state with Hebrew (in its modern ’ivrit form) as its official language. Its population was progressively made up of a number of larger and smaller immigrant waves of Jews from all over the world, who spoke various languages.

The existence of cultural and closer literary ties between these two territories, which in several respects were constantly changing, is based primarily on the high rate of Jewish emigration from Czechoslovakia after the First World War (associated with the international Zionist movement), just before and during the Second World War (due to Nazi persecution and the Holocaust) and several years after it, as well as after 1968 (as Jews became increasingly distrustful of Europe as a safe place to live, and particularly as a result of the Communist coup). After the great majority of the Jewish population had departed and the government declared its hostility towards Israel, practically all cultural and thus literary ties ceased after 1950 and only revived following the 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia and the subsequent restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

As we are dealing with the literary ties between Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic and Israel from the 1890s to the present, we shall for the most part be speaking about the translation of literary works, not about the emigration of Jewish writers.

Writers from the Czech lands in Palestine and Israel

During the 20th century the oldest well-known literary émigré to what was then Palestine was Miriam Singer. She was born in 1898 to an assimilated Jewish family in a small Czech village. When she was three her father died and her mother moved to Prague with her children. When Miriam, called Irma at home, was sixteen years old she started going to Blau-Weiss, the “Jewish scouts”. On one occasion she came across a man who had such a distinctive Jewish appearance that entranced she followed him and presently came to a neighbourhood where wartime refugees from Galicia were housed. Irma made friends with some children playing in front of the house, and subsequently began visiting them regularly. She told them stories of Jewish heroes that she had just learnt herself. One day a respectable-looking stranger came to sit with them and listen for a while, before he asked Irma: “why don’t you put this down on paper?”

Miriam Singer

The man was Max Brod, and it was thanks to his efforts that a collection of her stories came out in German entitled The Locked Garden (elsewhere The Locked Book). In her first work Irma was evidently writing very naively about Palestine, but very soon the book had been translated into French and Polish, making her a highly regarded writer when she was just seventeen. From her early childhood, however, she had longed to be a teacher by profession. She completed several courses in Germany and then decided on Aliyah (emigration) to Palestine. Her mother agreed providing the girl travelled under the protection of the Jewish official Samuel Hugo Bergmann (1883 Prague, 1975 Jerusalem), who was about to emigrate himself (he subsequently became the Director of the Jewish National Museum and Chancellor of the Jerusalem University). Irma was enthusiastic and started to learn Hebrew straight away. She studied it, allegedly together with Franz Kafka, at Jiří Mordechai Langer’s, who had just returned from the Rebbe of Belz and who walked around Prague in extravagent Hasidic garb to the consternation of the Jews themselves. However, after a month of intensive study Irma realized that in such a short space of time she would not learn the language to the extent required to teach children born in Palestine, so she wrote to Degania to ask if in the meantime they did not need her as an ordinary manual worker. At the end of 1920 she arrived at this the first ever kibbutz, where from the outset she shared a room with three other women (including the future acclaimed Israeli poet Rachel). Opposite them lived the men, including A. D. Gordon, and while the prominent Zionist ideologist taught them Hebrew, Irma continued to write articles and poems, which she published exclusively in the German-language press. She did not want Degania members to know that she was writing, but when the Davar daily printed one of her poems translated into Hebrew, the secret was out. Meanwhile Irma had improved her language so much that she was finally able to start working as a teacher at a nursery school. Over the next few decades she took part in the education of several generations of children, while continuing to write, now in Hebrew, for this age group. In her book Dan, Jan a čáp (Dan, Jan and the Stork) she dealt in a humane and sophisticated manner and in language that was evidently accessible to young readers with the Second World War. She later also wrote about the Israeli War of Independence. Irma married one of the founders of the legendary kibbutz, Yaakov Berkovic, an agriculturalist who loved books, tranquility and solitude. Towards the end of her life she worked as a seamstress, as she never fully got along with Degania, its Eastern European founders and its collective community, as she was the only member who came from “Western” Europe. She died in 1989 at the age of 91.

Although he was a staunch Zionist, Max Brod (1884 Prague, 1968 Tel Aviv), Irma’s mentor and one of the leading representatives of Prague German literature, only took refuge in Palestine at the age of 55, primarily out of necessity, as he escaped from Czechoslovakia just before it was occupied by the Nazis on 14 March 1939, taking with him a suitcase of manuscripts by the then largely unknown Franz Kafka. In Palestine and subsequently Israel he worked as a dramaturge at the Habima Theatre, as well as a music and theatre critic. He did not hark back to his renown in Czechoslovakia, he did not become significantly involved in the literature of the new state and he did not fit too well into its multicultural society. Brod was survived by Kafka’s work, which he had carefully safeguarded and edited. Then again, Irma’s Hebrew teacher Jiří Mordechai Langer (1894 Prague, 1943 Tel Aviv; brother of the writer and dramatist František Langer) fared far worse in Palestine. He had held a privileged position among Prague Jewish intellectuals as he probably mastered Hebrew better than any of them: when he made his debut in 1929 with the collection Pijutim ve-širej jedidut (Poems and Songs of Friendship), this was the first and for a long time the last collection written in Hebrew in Prague after a long century. He compiled his last collection of poems Meat cori (A Little Balsam) towards the end of his life as he lay in hospital exhausted due to complications from his illegal emigration. It was not until 2014 that both collections were published in Hebrew together with their Czech translation by the Prague publishers P3K, while in Israel itself Langer’s work did not make a significant mark.⁴⁹Other Jewish authors emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Palestine before and during the Second World War, apart from Singer, Brod and Langer. Journalist, writer and Zionist Hugo Hermann (1888 Moravská Třebová, 1949 Jerusalem) emigrated in 1934 and wrote his memoirs in Palestine – albeit in German. Leo Perutz (1882 Prague, 1957 Bad Ischl), the author of historical novels, who emigrated in 1939 and then lived alternately in Israel and Austria from the late 1940s, continued to write works in German, which took a critical stance towards the nationally defined Jewish state. Felix Weltsch (1884 Prague, 1964 Jerusalem), who together with Max Brod undertook an exploratory trip to Palestine before the war and wrote a book about it Land der Gegensätze. Eindrücke e. Palästinareise (Land of Opposites. Impressions from a Trip to Palestine. Prague 1929), continued to publish in Czech and German after emigrating in 1939. Tuvia Ruebner (1924, Bratislava) emigrated to Palestine in 1941, worked as a teacher in Merhavia Kibbutz and evenings translated German literature into Hebrew and vice versa. From 1953 he started publishing his own poetry in Hebrew, becoming an acclaimed Israeli poet and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Haifa.

A collection of Jiří M. Langer’s poetry

Other authors did not emigrate from Czechoslovakia until after the state of Israel was established. The survivor Eva Erbenová (born 1930 in Děčín as Eva Löwidt) moved there with her husband Petr (who was inter alia the last director of the Czechoslovak Makabi youth physical training movement) in 1949 via Paris. Both have been living in Ashkelon ever since. A Czech documentary entitled O zlém snu (A Bad Dream), was made in 2000 on the basis of motifs from her book Vyprávěj mámo, jak to bylo (Tell Us How It Was, Mum), published in the Czech Republic (1994), Israel, Germany and France. In an extended version called Sen (Dream) (Prague 2001) Erbenová describes the events of the First Republic, the Second World War and the Holocaust from a child’s viewpoint. The book also loosely inspired the screenplay of another Czech film Poslední cyklista (The Last Cyclist), premiered in 2014. The most critically acclaimed writer to leave Czechoslovakia for Israel was Viktor Fischl, alias Avigdor Dagan (1912 Hradec Králové, 2006 Jerusalem). After emigrating in 1949 he was Israeli ambassador to several countries and it was not until he had retired as a diplomat that he began to publish again, though even his later work was written in Czech and only translated into Hebrew from German and English translations provided by the author. Another prominent Czechoslovak native who was literarily active in Israel was Ota B. Kraus (1921 Prague, 2000 Netanya). As one of the survivors Kraus published a gripping novel just after the war, depicting the ordeal at Auschwitz Země bez Boha (Land Without God), while his other books are also of great value: Vítr z hor (Mountainwind) and Vepři ve při (Tel Kotzim), which describe the joys and sorrows at an Israeli kibbutz. They evidently first came out in Hebrew to no great acclaim, but then in the early 1990s another survivor saw to their Czech publication, Kraus’s friend Pavel Stránský. For years the author tried to publish his books in English and contributed financially himself towards the publication of the short stories The Dream Merchant and Other Galilean Stories (USA 1991). His final novel Cesta pouští was meant to be his magnum opus, but unfortunately he did not manage to publish the book in English during his lifetime as he had originally intended (it was to be called Desert Years). It eventually came out after his death on the initiative of his widow Dita Kraus at the end of last year in Czech translation by Alice Marxová. The book is a great contribution, thanks in particular to its unique portrayal of a young Zionist growing up before the Second World War in Czechoslovakia.

Ota B. Kraus

In February this year I met up in Israel with Dita Kraus, whose life inspired Spanish author Antonio G. Iturbe to write the novel La Bibliotecaria de Auschwitz (The Auschwitz Librarian). She told me how she emigrated with Ota and her young son from Czechoslovakia because of the trouble the Communists were giving them and how after various escapades they settled down at the Giv’at Chaim Kibbutz, only to leave seven years later not entirely in good odour there. “On the one hand they were very pleased to accept new members, particularly young people who had many years of productivity ahead of them, but then on the other hand they gave them the least pleasant work. Ota describes this in one of the chapters of his book Vepři ve při. They didn’t give you what you were able to do: first you had to rub off the rough edges – wash the dishes and clean the latrines, because that is what they themselves had done when they had set up the kibbutz. Now they wanted to do something better themselves, so let the new ones do all that. As a result many members progressively left the kibbutz including a number of Czechoslovaks… When Ota wanted to publish Vítr z hor, the kibbutz was against it, because it came out against the communal education of children. My husband insisted on publishing the book, and when it eventually happened they more or less told us that we could not stay.” After that the Krauses had nothing more to do with any kibbutzim: they moved to Hadassim near Netanya, where Ota found work as an English teacher at a boarding school.⁵⁰ Jaroslav Balvín: “Najděte si mě na googlu! S Ditou Krausovou o jejím poosvětimském životě” in Salon Práva, 7. 5. 2015″ in Salon Práva, 7.5.2015

Erich Kulka

Of the remaining Jewish authors who emigrated to Israel after 1968, Erich Kulka (1911 Vsetín, 1995 Jerusalem) co-authored the popular non-fiction work on Auschwitz Továrna na smrt (Death Factory) (Prague 1945) with Ota Kraus (not to be confused with Ota B. Kraus, Ota Kraus is the father of the popular Czech entertainer and actor Jan Kraus and author Ivan Kraus). He left Czechoslovakia in 1968, working as a historian at the Hebrew University and at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. His son Otto Dov Kulka (1933 Nový Hrozenkov), who emigrated to Israel with his parents, is primarily interested in history and philosophy, which he teaches at Jerusalem University. He has published numerous specialist works and at an advanced age wrote an essayistic book of memoirs on “his” Holocaust entitled Krajiny metropole smrti (Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death). It came out in Hebrew in 2013 and in Czech translation in 2014. The author of the famous Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street), Slovak Ladislav Grosman (1921 Humenné, 1981 Tel Aviv), emigrated to Israel in 1968 and worked from 1969 at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, where he lectured on Slavonic literature and taught creative writing. From 1979 he also lectured on scriptwriting at Tel Aviv University. He wrote the screenplay for the television film Dod David holejch lirot kala (1972, based on the short story Rendez-vous strýce Davida (Uncle David’s Rendez-vous)) and during the 1970s Israeli radio presented several of his fiction works as readings or dramatizations.⁵¹In future we may get to know more in retrospect about the literary activities of other Czechoslovak emigrants to Palestine and Israel, as staff at the Bejt Terezín archive in the Giv’at Chaim Ichud Kibbutz attest it includes numerous writings left by survivors in Czech, German and Hebrew. I myself know of a book by Lisa Gidron née Kummermann and Hana Fischlová, recalling the Terezín ghetto. Research will be facilitated by the digitization of the Israeli Memorial archive planned for next year.

Some Czechoslovak authors just emigrated to Palestine or Israel for a short time, or visited the country for a longer period and then wrote about it. Jan Martinec (real name Martin Reach, 1915 Prague, 1995 Prague) lived in Palestine after emigrating clandestinely in 1939, he was then active in the Allied forces and went back to Czechoslovakia after the war. In a series of reports published in magazines he described his experience with Aliyah Bet (illegal emigration) and the British internment camps, as well as later in the memoir section of his novel Bastard (Prague 1968), which is unfortunately relatively uneven in terms of quality.

Controversial author Ladislav Mňačko (1919 Valašské Klobouky, 1994 Bratislava) was not of Jewish origin, but nevertheless took a broad interest in Jewish topics. He published a book of reports from the War of Independence period Izrael, národ v boji (Israel, A Nation in Struggle) (Prague 1949) and in Já, Adolf Eichmann (I, Adolf Eichmann) (Prague 1961) he dealt (unfortunately to a large degree in a tendentious manner) with the trial of one of the greatest war criminals, which took place in Jerusalem and which Mňačko witnessed at first hand. In protest against the Czechoslovak government’s position on the Arab-Israeli conflict he emigrated to Israel for several months in 1967. He then left for Germany where his final book report on Israel came out in German, Die Aggressoren. Von der Schuld und Unschuld der Schwachen (Vienna, Munich, Zurich 1968). Arnošt Lustig (1926 Prague, 2011 Prague) was first sent to Israel as a correspondent by Lidové noviny, Židovský věstník and Zemědělské noviny in 1948, and then again a year later by Czechoslovak Radio. The experience of a reporter involved in the fight for national independence inspired him to write a novel on a love affair overshadowed by war entitled Miláček (Sweetheart) (Prague 1969); he worked on a similar topic many years later in a novella called Na letišti (At the Airport), later renamed Nemáme na vybranou (We Have No Choice) (Prague 2003 and 2007). Lustig also stayed in Israel in 1968-1969, before heading to the USA. Ruth Bondy (1923, Prague) is discussed below in connection with the translation of Czech literature into Hebrew, although she is also noteworthy as an author. Bondy left the country as a very young survivor in 1948, she learnt the language and presently made her mark as a journalist, though she also wrote biographies, popularizing books on Czechoslovak Jews and Czechoslovak literature and memoirs. Her titles have for the most part been published in Hebrew and are normally translated into Czech.

Arnošt Lustig and Markéta Mališová

Looking at contemporary Czech literature, the motif of emigration to Israel after 1968 crops up in Irena Dousková’s (1964 Příbram) first work, the epistolary novel Goldstein píše dceři (Goldstein Writes to his Daughter) (Prague 1997). Tomáš Kolský (1978 Prague) made good use of his experiences on his study trip to Israel in his debut work Ruthie a barevnost světa (Ruthie and the Colourfulness of the World) (Prague 2003). The only prose work to date by this author who moved to Israel several years ago has also proved quite successful. He now publishes short journalistic pieces on contemporary Israel in his blog.

Translations of Czech literature into Hebrew

Ruth Bondy, the most prominent and for a long time the only consistently active translator of Czech literature into Hebrew, wrote in her book Víc štěstí než rozumu (More Luck than Sense) (Prague 2003) that in her youth she liked to do crosswords and came back to them forty years later by starting to translate from Czech into Hebrew…⁵²At the same time she belongs to the school of translation that does not try to improve the original or to eliminate repetition. “If an author writes ‘child’ five times in a single paragraph I do not change it. Nor do I write ‘child’ the first time, ‘youngster’ the second time and ‘infant’ the third. If he piles the words up without sorting them out, as Bohumil Hrabal does, for example, I do not cut anything out for the reader’s convenience just because I would write it differently.” By way of example she gives Hrabal’s I Served the King of England. In 1992 the director of Eked publishers told Bondy she liked the English translation of this book and asked her to translate it from Czech into Hebrew. She says that when she read the English version and compared it with the Czech original, she found she had two different books in front of her: whereas the Czech original seemed to flow, off the top of his head without punctuation, in the English the translator had split it up into sentences. She would not have found such a translation acceptable. Likewise she refused when they wanted her to abridge Václav Havel’s typically long sentences for the Israeli reader. When she was translating Švejk in its entirety, she had to deal with the fact that he had already made himself at home in Israel, due both to abridged translations from languages other than Czech and to the theatre adaptation by Max Brod. To make it easier for Israeli audiences to understand, he had decided to move the plot from the Austro-Hungarian to the British army. However, in the case of Švejk Bondy also had to resort to a serious intervention: she translated the German expressions as well as the Czech into Hebrew. Why the comparison? Primarily because of Israel – which is a different world, with different nature and different superstitions. Compared with the Hebrew, Czech sentences are longer and more complex. Hebrew completely lacks diminutives, and the transcription of Czech diacritics in proper names like Baťa and Petřín is problematic – and there are numerous other complications. Moreover, there is no comprehensive Czech-Hebrew dictionary available, so Bondy recalls that when she was translating Čapek’s Zahradníkův rok (Gardener’s Year), she first had to look up the Latin names of Czech plants and only then did she find the Hebrew equivalent from the Latin. She doubted that Čapek’s book would be successful in Israel, particularly because of its quite different climate and because there are few keen gardeners there, but Zahradníkův rok found itself on the bestsellers’ list in 2010.

Ruth Bondy

Bondy believes that works by Czech authors can only get translated into Hebrew in two ways: via English, German or French translations that might be read and recommended by a publisher’s reader, as in the case of Kundera, Hrabal and Havel, or on the recommendation of the translators themselves. Bondy writes that it was thanks to her tips that Viewegh and Ota Pavel were successful, while contrary to her expectations Jan Otčenášek’s Romeo, Julie a tma (Romeo, Juliet and the Darkness) and Jan Jandourek’s Daniel v jámě lvové (Daniel in the Lion’s Den) did not do well.

Bondy says that some seventy works by Czech authors have been translated into Hebrew since the 1930s, including novels, short stories, dramas and essays by such writers as Ivan Klíma, Pavel Kohout, František Langer, Josef Škvorecký and Jan Werich as well as those mentioned above.⁵³Of all the most prominent Czech authors only the greatest poets are missing from the Israeli reader’s general awareness of our literature: when Jaroslav Seifert was awarded the Nobel Prize, the newspapers and magazines published Hebrew translations of his poems from English. Bondy herself did not venture to translate poetry, either Seifert’s or any other. She also says that the number of translations is actually quite astonishing in comparison with the number of books by Israeli authors that are, or rather for a long time were, available in Czech, as translation from Hebrew into Czech only de facto got under way during the 1990s, primarily for political reasons and later due to the lack of high standard translators. She adds that the Czechs’ special humour – subtle, ironic, not cruel, but mixed in with life’s wisdom – is one of the main reasons behind the popularity of Czech literature in Israel, while another reason is our common fate – we are both small nations that have stood on the brink of destruction and have had to defend ourselves against large nations – two nations that have mastered the art of survival.

The increased interest in modern and contemporary Czech literature in Israel after the break-up of the Soviet bloc and the “Velvet Revolution” fell off around the turn of the millennium. “I am actually glad that following Ruth Bondy, Pierre Friedmann, who grew up in Israel, has now started translating,” said Lukáš Přibyl, Director of the Czech Centre in Tel Aviv, early this March. Although he believes that Czech culture in Israel is generally thriving (for example, Czech dance is a thing here), every other field of activity evidently has it easier than literature these days. He himself is taken aback by the number of translations coming out in Israel: “There is a surprisingly large amount of them for such a small country’s market, particularly when you consider just how linguistically diverse it is: there are large Russian, English and French-speaking communities here, and many people are able to read books in their original language…” Eastern European literature is brought out in Israel by several publishers. The Russian-speaking community includes more than a million people, while other generations now prefer to read Russian literature in Hebrew. The Polish-based community is also very large here. “Unfortunately the Czech community was never that large and it is now getting smaller and smaller. Making the grandchildren of emigrants interested in Czech culture is one of our aims at the Czech Centre.” Even if the translation is finished and ready for printing, the publishers hesitate to bring it out. “Perhaps this is actually due to the excess pressure on the market and the fear of presenting an unknown author in a small country. They also hesitate because there has been a change in the law whereby book sale prices are set, so many publishers first want to find out how the market is going to react.” Přibyl knows of several such “dormant” translations from Czech that will remain that way even though the publishers have been contacted with various schemes to support their publication. The difficult road to Israel for Czech literature was also confirmed to me by literary agent Edgar de Bruin from the Pluh agency: “I am working together with the Deborah Harris Literary Agency there, as it is quite difficult to get in direct contact with Israeli publishers. I have tried several times in the past without success. At least thanks to collaboration with this agency Europeana by Patrik Ouředník has been brought out.”

Přibyl believes that the greatest name from Czech literature in Israel is still Švejk, as it is elsewhere in the world. The Czech Centre Director smilingly recalls how some time ago the Tel Aviv National Theatre turned to him with a request for financial assistance for an adaptation of this novel, as the required amount would have covered operations at the Centre for several years. Finally, however, the Czech Centre did support the play, by translating and adapting the Hebrew text for Russian titles. Aware of how popular the First World War Czechoslovak anti-hero was in Russia and how Israel has so many Russians, who are not familiar enough with Hebrew to be able to follow a play in it, Přibyl considered the issue. Eventually, thanks to this support, attendances at the performance evidently doubled. “The poster showed Švejk in a British uniform – khaki shorts and shirt,” Přibyl smiled. “That is a typical idea of a soldier from the First World War around here.”

As we were talking in the Israeli capital during the winter, the Director of the Czech Centre was occupied with a visit being made by the illustrator Jiří Slíva. In addition to presenting an exhibition in a Tel Aviv gallery the graphic artist was also reading a lecture at a conference on Franz Kafka. Incidentally, Slíva has also illustrated several books and translations by Ruth Bondy, which have come out both in Israel and the Czech Republic. Přibyl is currently working on a commemoration of Václav Havel, who he says is the only Czech apart from Masaryk that “everybody” knows in Israel. “Almost every town has a street named after Masaryk. There is even a Kfar Masaryk Kibbutz and lots of cafes bear his name. Havel was the first Eastern European statesman to visit Israel after the fall of the Iron Curtain and he is remembered just like Masaryk. Even as a newly elected President, Havel pointed out the need to reestablish the broken ties of friendship between the two countries in his New Year’s Address, but hitherto there has been nothing that bore his name.” Thanks to the efforts of the Czech Centre and the Czech Embassy in Tel Aviv, one of the smaller streets in Jerusalem with an adjacent park is soon to be named after Havel, while a Václav Havel bench is to appear in Israel from the Bořek Šípek workshop. “Havel and the 25th anniversary of the reestablishment of diplomatic ties are also recalled by numerous films, including Odcházení (Leaving), while the Spitfire Company has presented a production of Antiwords inspired by Havel, and an exhibition of photographs and a commemorative event will take place at the illustrious King David Hotel in Israel.”

I met Pierre Friedmann, who Lukáš Přibyl had told me about in Tel Aviv, this spring in Prague, where he has been a translator for the last five years. His ancestors on his mother’s side were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, while his father had a German background, but the translator ascribes his passion for this small Central European language and its literature to a fateful meeting with Karel Čapek. “I started to study world literature and I got to really like Czech works in particular. When I came across Zahradníkův rok in English, it really took me, as Čapek can write so vividly and fascinatingly about everyday things, so I wanted to read it in the original. I was fortunate in that David Hron was teaching at Tel Aviv University. He taught me along with two other students with Czech ancestry. Then I was awarded three grants at Charles University. Originally I wanted to write a thesis on Čapek in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, because I believe the Czech writer said everything the French thinker said sixty years later, but eventually I wrote it on Čapek’s conception of truth. This year my first translation of one of his books was brought out by Carmel publishers – Kritika slov (Critique of Words). I presented it at the February book fair in Jerusalem and it had a great response.”

The year before last in Jerusalem Friedmann also presented his translation of Jáchym Topol’s Kloktat dehet (Gargling with Tar). “It was published by Achuzat Bayit. Three or four years ago they called me to say they had bought the rights to the work, but Ruth Bondy, who they asked first, said it was untranslatable. I did not want to translate it. I was happy enough just to be writing about books – I was working as a literary critic – but eventually I agreed and I also translated his last novella Chladnou zemí (The Devil’s Workshop), which is due out this year.” It evidently took Friedmann a year to finish each Topol title. I wondered if he had contacted the author over any “translation teaser”. “For the first book it didn’t even occur to me. When we got together later, Jáchym told me he was grateful I was the only translator who didn’t bother him. That is how I found out that he was used to it, so when I was working on Chladnou zemí, I did send him some questions, but Jáchym nearly always said I could put what I wanted there. He is good that way.” Linguistically, Topol’s books are characterized by slang, which Hebrew uses too, but almost all of it is from Arabic or Yiddish, “which doesn’t work for Topol, ” Friedmann explained. “Very often I have looked at his words and phrases and tried to imagine how my Polish grandmother, who made mistakes in her Hebrew, would have said them. And occasionally I had to think up new words. Ivrit is constantly developing and neologisms often keep organically cropping up, but they have to be based on grammatical rules, make sense and sound good. I’m afraid I didn’t come up with any robots for Topol,” the translator smiled. Kloktat dehet had a good critical response, but evidently hardly anybody but the critics read it. “Jáchym said that was the case in most of the languages it had been translated into,” Friedmann revealed.

Pierre Friedmann’s translation of ‘Kloktat dehet’ published by Achuzat Bayit

And other Czech writers? What about Emil Hakl, for example? “I have offered him to the publishers several times now, but nobody wants him. I don’t know why. Likewise they rejected Balabán, which bothers me even more, because that is really good literature.” Friedmann is expecting a lot from a translation due out this year, Fuks’s Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator). “I recommended the book to the largest publisher in Israel, Zmora-Bitan. Two reviewers and the editor-in-chief read it in English and all of them were enthusiastic: it is an outstanding novel about the Holocaust, which appeals to the Israelis. I hope it is a bestseller. To mark the publication of the translation, Lukáš Přibyl, Director of the Czech Centre in Tel Aviv, would like to show the film, which has not previously been shown in Israel, at a local cinema and to invite not only myself but also director Juraj Herz to the presentation.” This year the Terezín diaries of Helga Hošková-Weissová and Michal Kraus are also due out in Hebrew translation by Pierre Friedmann. He is currently working on a translation of an extract from Altschulova metoda (Altschul’s Method) by Chaim Cigan. “I hope some publisher shows an interest in the book. I like it. It includes mysticism and absolutely everything else that ought to be in a good book – and what’s more, interestingly, it was written under a pseudonym by a Chief Rabbi.”⁵⁴Jaroslav Balvín: “Netanjahu? Zůstanu v Česku, říká izraelský překladatel Pierre Friedmann” in Salon Práva, 28. 5. 2015

says editor and novelist Jan Němec, whose fictionalized biography of a prominent Czech photographer comes out this month.In 2010 you were among three authors nominated for the Jiří Orten Prize with your short story collection Hra pro čtyři ruce (Game for Four Hands), but you did not convert the nomination, as Jan Těsnohlídek actually won. Are you sorry?
That is a question that I don’t ask myself retrospectively. As an author you can perhaps say this much – that almost every prize is rather better to receive than not receive. Of course, this does not have much in common with the actual writing, but it helps in “literary life”. And you have to live a literary life at least for some time.

A little known fact is that you made your debut back in 2007 with a poetry collection entitled První život published by Větrné mlýny.
A lot of prose writers started out with a collection of poems. Then they like to exalt themselves above themselves, but the experience of poetry is crucial: it promotes fully aware use of language, it compels you to select and weigh your words one after the other. There are many authors who unconsciously submit to the language and just write automatically. It’s funny. Language is a power and as you write it can also be a partner, indeed the only one that you have. Apart from what we are going to say to each other, writing poetry is less demanding on time in comparison with prose, and when you are eighteen you have a lot of other important things to do…

How did the stories later published in Hra pro čtyři ruce, which was published by Druhé město in 2009, actually come about?
As long as you are not an established author, but just a “literary freelancer”, you write what you fancy as a rule and you feel happy on Earth. But then at some point, unsurprisingly you realise that your texts are intertwining somewhere underground and that this twine makes some kind of sense. It struck me that all my stories include a feeling of unrequited or unconsummated love. So the book acquired the subtitle Málem milostné povídky – Almost Love Stories. When I look back I have the feeling that this was just another stage on the road from poetry to prose. Short stories are also an excellent laboratory for another reason. You can try various approaches and discover your various voices.

I presume that when you were writing them you had no guarantee of publication.
I didn’t. I offered the manuscript to Host publishers, where I had just started to work, but Mirek Balaštík rejected it. I sent the book to Druhé město, and Martin Reiner accepted that same manuscript.

In that case you made an interesting tour of the Brno publishers: this autumn your third book Dějiny světla is being brought out by your home publisher Host at last. Its catalogue of publications tells us that it will be a literary biography of the famous photographer František Drtikol. Why did you decide to write about him?
It was the powerful symbolism of light that attracted me to him: he spent the first part of his life as an artistic photographer and worked enthusiastically with external light, which he said made photography. At the turn of the century he was studying in Munich, which at that time was at the heart of the Secession style, and again Secession was amongst other things a style of lighting. He later became a world famous creator of nude scenes, but in the latter half of the 1920s he became absorbed in himself and discovered inner light. He turned away from the world and went into seclusion. His is an interesting and in many respects rather an unCzech fate. Our sort rarely manage to give up what we have achieved, even if in each person’s life there comes an important moment when nothing helps you gain so much. Drtikol finished de facto at his peak. He showed the courage to give up what he had based his livelihood on. He gave up the symbol on which art is based, in favour of a direct quest for the truth. He radically changed his life and spent the second half of his life as a spiritual teacher. His followers, including Eduard Tomáš, also famous thanks to the television series Paměti mystika, Memoirs of a Mystic, speak of him as the first patriarch of Czech Buddhism. And that, after all, is quite fascinating: the man who was the first to exhibit a female nude in this country is the same one who was to translate the Tibetan Book of the Dead into Czech. This all smacks of integrity…

Quite a number of books have come out on Drtikol. Are you contributing anything new?  
As far as the facts are concerned, only minor details. It is a novel, so I am more like thinking things up… When you go through the available literature on Drtikol, you soon find that it is divided up in a strange way: on the one hand there are works by photography historians who deal with the first half of Drtikol’s life and do not talk much about the other, with the exception of the last Anna Fárová. And then there are the reminiscences of his spiritual disciples who sometimes did not even know that Drtikol was a famous photographer. This looks like a real rift, but when you look closely at Drtikol’s story, you find it has a clear line running through it and makes sense. Just like a story of light.

It should be said that his work is harmonically based: remember, we are still speaking about pre-avant-garde art, which swore on beauty and truthfulness, and so had an affinity to the spiritual, which is just its natural extension. Contemporary art is cynical, playful, socially engaged and goodness knows what else, but rarely does it allow itself to be serious and passionate. As was considered desirable at the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries. Perhaps this also attracted me to Drtikol: the possibility of writing directly without scoffing about basic things, such as beauty or seeking inner truth. Today artists are driven into a corner where they hatch plots or masturbate. For once I have had the good fortune to avoid that…

And what about Drtikol’s Communist involvement? How does that fit in?
Drtikol’s life included several notable transformations and contradictions, and that is why it is such interesting material. But I shall stick to what you have asked. In 1945 he became a Communist and remained in the party throughout the 1950s, when he also espoused Buddhism and his followers considered him to be fully enlightened, until his death in 1961. In his diary he wrote “Buddhism = Communism” and he said that Buddha was the first materialist philosopher, long before Marx and Lenin. So from today’s perspective his biography has quite a bizarre coda.

In this respect Drtikol is somewhat reminiscent of Egon Bondy.
The two of them actually met. Bondy mentions in his memoirs that Drtikol set him straight when he was still a confused young man – which I feel he continued to be for some time. In Drtikol’s case, however, joining and remaining in the Communist Party is all the more mysterious, considering that in the First Republic he was completely apolitical.

Have you come to any conclusion in your book with regard to this contentious point?
It was not my aim to arrive at any conclusions, or even to judge the hero of my novel. Others are there for that. I can only surmise. He came from Příbram, which was an important mining town under Austria-Hungary, with the largest silver mines in the entire Empire, so that fact that he tended towards a left-wing worldview is biographically understandable. Besides, few artists are right-wing liberals. That is kind of incompatible, whatever people might think. Even as a youngster he was enchanted by the Pan-slav idea: boys at Sokol used to say that the Russians would come one day and liberate us from Austrian, that is Germanic subjugation – and that is what they did… But let’s not forget that Drtikol was born in 1883, which means a completely different historical awareness to the element we float in today.

It is easy to understand why he joined the Communist Party in 1945, but it is rather more difficult to grasp why he stayed in it throughout the 1950s. In the early 1950s he wrote letters to his followers, which were full of not only Marxist but even Stalinist claptrap, urging them to leave the church and join the Communist party.. It’s a mystery if he ever later reassessed all this. For example, his personal papers include a newspaper cutting on the Chinese occupation of Tibet, so I presume he must have at least been aware that Communism did not equal Buddhism… But I would not like to give the impression that this stage in Drtikol’s life particularly interests me in any way. In the novel it is just a peripeteia, but we can learn from it: even people who are spiritually mature can be entirely confused. I’d say that spiritual disciples don’t have it easy at all with their teachers.

You had been interested in Drtikol for a long time and now you knew enough about him. So what did the actual writing involve?
You never do know enough. I spent a lot of time in libraries, archives and museums. But I was not reading so much of the literature about Drtikol himself, because that is not all that extensive, as books presenting the historical context: when you are writing about somebody who was born under the Habsburgs, and lived through the First World War and the First Republic, you first have to form an impression of the mental map of the time. Then it was essential to find the key to how to tell this story at all. I don’t want to be tedious with technical details, but for example, for a long time I was wondering whether to write in the third person or the first. I tried both. The third person struck me as remote, whereas the first person gave me an itch because I was going beyond the limits: I’m not František Drtikol and I’m not interested in simulating him. It was only then that I came up with a way to precisely reflect the situation of an author who has decided to write about somebody else. It’s what is known as the du-form, the second person, meaning that I actually address Drtikol. So the entire book is actually a dialogue between the author and the character, although the author doesn’t actually speak for himself at all. In the book the author doesn’t have a different I to the you, that is important. And in the end it actually turns out that the addressor is not the author.

Is the du-form reader-friendly? You wrote the novel on Drtikol in Polička and Krakow.
My primary task is not to be reader-friendly. Clearly, the du-form used throughout the novel is a bit of an experiment. Still, the dialogue is more vivid for most people than any other speech situation. It needs to be tried.

So Poland first. Were you in residence there at Villa Decius, where the Arts Institute sends Czech authors?
I did apply for a residence there, but this brings us back to your first question: Do you have to live a literary life to have a claim to a living… And that is why it is rather better to receive a prize than not to receive one, precisely because of these small favours that become available to you as a literary persona. Jan Těsnohlídek, who received the Orten Prize, was at Villa Decius at the time, so I made my own arrangements. Together with my girlfriend, who was at Krakow on an Erasmus placement, I rented a small flat in the centre and we saw Jan in the bus. Although we are practically strangers, our paths do cross considerably: a long time ago we even had the same girlfriend – though of course not at the same time. We don’t cross that way. I remember him from that time as a long-haired faun who wrote brittle lyrical texts and shared them at Písmák.cz.

And Polička  – is that your home town?
I was born in Brno and lived there all the time until I was 22. Then I moved to Polička for a year, where I had only ever been once before, so I didn’t know a living soul there. The first notice board I came across had an advert for a cheap flat with a view onto a garden, ramparts, an avenue and a pond. I lived there alone just for myself without any special plan or intention. And when that flat came vacant again about three years ago, and by the way, J. A. Pitínský’s daughter lived there in the meantime, I rented it again together with my parents. And at the beginning of last year I went back there to write, as I had finally managed to sort out my external life around that. However this novel is received, I spent a great year in my own way. It’s unbelievable but you could ultimately be happy if something wasn’t continuously forcing you into molds that are not for you.

Interviewed by Jaroslav Balvín