Ruritania comes to London on 12 May

Tomáš Zmeškal

Londoners are in for a real Ruritanian treat on 12 May when authors Tomáš Zmeškal and Hamid Ismailov are to be found in conversation with Ruritanian revisionist theorist, Misha Glenny.

Tomáš Zmeškal’s debut novel "Love Letter in Cuneiform" is a family saga - a story of marriage, love and destiny set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and 1990s. Josef meets his wife, Květa, before the WWII at a public lecture and she marries him instead of their mutual friend Hynek. But when her husband is arrested and unlawfully imprisoned, Květa gives herself to Hynek in return for help and advice. Exploring what is not spoken, what cannot be said and the repercussions of silence, Zmeškal's tale, told as a mosaic of events, exposes the larger, ongoing struggle of post communist Eastern Europe to come to terms with suffering when catharsis is denied. 

Hamid Ismailov’s latest book The Dead Lake, long-listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is a haunting Russian tale about environmental legacy of the Cold War. It tells a story of a gifted violinist Yerzhan growing up on the Kazakh steppes, the Soviet test ground for atomic weapons. Yerzhan falls in love with the neighbour’s daughter and to impress her, he dives into a forbidden lake. Its radioactive water stops his growth and he becomes trapped in a boy’s body while the girl he loves grows into a beautiful woman. Drawing attention to atomic tests taking place between 1945 and 1989 in Kazakhstan, Ismailov creates a parable of modern arms race impacting on people’s lives and tradition.

Full details can be found here

Josef Jedlčka book launch at Waterstones Piccadilly 14 April

Subversion and Laugher: Growing up under Socialism in the 1970s and 1980s

 

Next week, the marvelous urban anthropologist Pavla Jonssonová will be joined by the author Jiří Pehe, academic Martin Machovec and poet Tomáš Míka to celebrate childhood and growing up in "socialist" Czechoslovakia in the1970s and 1980s.

Expect subversive insight and laughter!

Three Faces of an Angel - Jiří Pehe book review

This gripping and at times horrific saga detailing the lives of three generations of a German-Czech-Jewish family is very definitely a text for those with a strong interest in 20the century history. It is also raises a number of questions about politics, identity and religion. As you might expect, the novel contains tragic episodes beginning in Prague before 1914 and ending on the morning of 9/11 in a café next to the World Trade Centre. 

The triumphant final section of the book will be of particular delight to students of intellectual masturbation. The author, a political scientist, gives voice to his monstrous character, Alex, in a bruising and well argued critique of the notions of "Cold War Studies" morphing into "Globalisation" and then "post-colonialism" as practised by "best selling author-academics" in the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, those notions are now airbrushed from intellectual history but the bastard child they inspired is the wickedly funny notion of "the Globalization of postmodernism". 

Added to this is the frequent appearance of the angel, Ariel. Not as well known as Michael or Gabriel or in Jewish or Christian sacred texts, he is a very disturbing presence, sometimes benign, at other times downright homicidal.

Václav Havel described the original Czech text as “remarkable”, Ivan Klíma wrote that is was “one of the most outstanding novels written in the Czech lands since 1989. A truly Central European novel with a universal message”. However unlikely, it was in fact Tomáš Halík who summed up the novel best as “an unusual and powerful novel about the 20^th century, the Holocaust in particular, but also about God”. Halík being a Jesuit priest, academic sociologist and winner of the Templeton Prize in 2014 might be the best judge of nuance in this case but not all.

With scenes of the Holocaust, fighting in Siberia and a particularly sensitive description of mental illness, this book is not for the faint-hearted. It is however, a major contribution to understanding the twentieth century experience west of France and north of the Mediterranean. It is funny, scary and thought provoking - Ruritanian Gothic with angels thrown in. Liberating! 

 

Rivers of Babylon - Peter Pišťanek book review

The finest novel written in Slovakia ever, Peter Pišťanek's The Rivers of Babylon was first published to great acclaim in 1991. Inside its covers, the character Rácz was revealed as the archetypal post-Communist "East European gangster". This revelation came as quite a shock to those controlling the local foreign exchange trading in Bratislava and the goons operating further east. 

Rácz was drawn so closely from the competing Bratislava post-Communist "elites" that it became difficult differentiate "the real Rácz". Was he an ex-secret policeman, an ex-member of the Czechoslovak Politburo, an up-and-coming "Slovak Nationalist" politician or a real live rural ponce trying to make it as a post Soviet Prince Michael? He was all and none and more.

Despite making only a cameo appearance in the second volume of what later became a trilogy,"The Wooden Village" was first oublished in 1994. Pišťanek's readers delighted in further tales of the "wild east". Already familiar characters described their participation in Rácz's byznyz: hotels, drugs and prostitution; and their ancillaries: the white slave trade, fetish clubs, porn movies, money laundering and other adventures and opportunities derived from the "privatisation" or "theft" of former state owned assets in the former self-governing province of Czechoslovakia.

By 1999 and now free from subsidising Slovak notions of self-determination and democracy, the Czechs of the former Czechoslovakia re-established themselves as a constitutional monarchy in the final installment: "The End of Freddy". In a flourish of Biblical proportions, The Royal Czech Navy assists Slovak separatists in a northern Arctic archipelago in return for a promise of the crude oil seeping up from the coastal tundra - killing Russian-speaking mercenaries along the way. Led by the reformed pornographer, Freddy, the absurd became real and the real absurd. 

Published in English in the late noughties by the marvellous Garnett Press, The Rivers of Babylon received rapturous reviews in the TLS, Independent, Guardian and Telegraph written by Britain's leading literary critics and authors. Those reviews made comparisons with the comic writing by Rabelais, Balzac and Gogol (Tim Beasley-Murray in the TLS); "less Dostoyevsky and more Tom Sharpe" (Tibor Fischer in the Telegraph). 

However, Pišťanek and Rácz were not praised enough. The Rivers of Babylon trilogy is a striking piece of alternative social history pretending to be satire. Absurdists from a different era: Havel and Ionescu are shown to be polite and dated petit bourgeois parlour pseuds. Pišťanek is raw and compelling and still fresh where the absurd is real and the real absurd.

Something that could be described as Ruritanian Gothic...

Book launch and sneak preview - Josef Jedlička's "Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life"

 

Fans of Ruritanian translation rejoice at the news that Alex Zucker's translation of Josef Jedlička's "Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life" will be launched at the Waterstones bookshop in Piccadilly on 14 April at 7pm.

A sneak preview of the text can be viewed courtesy of B O D Y