Contemporary Authors

• Spaceman of Bohemia ( novel) Little, Brown and Company (New York, NY), 2017

1. Spaceman of Bohemia LCCN 2016033557 Type of material Book Personal name Kalfar, Jaroslav, author. Main title Spaceman of Bohemia / Jaroslav Kalfař. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Description 276 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9780316273435 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PS3611.A4327 S63 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Hachette Book Group - https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/jaroslav-kalfar/

  JAROSLAV KALFAR

  Jaroslav Kalfar was born and raised in Prague, Czech Republic, and immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. He earned an MFA at New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and a nominee for the inaugural E. L. Doctorow Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn. This is his first novel.

• Brooklyn Rail - http://brooklynrail.org/2017/05/fiction/Jaroslav-Kalfar

  New Routes in Fiction
  A talk with Jaroslav Kalfar
  by Alec Niedenthal
  Jaroslav Kalfar’s debut, Spaceman of Bohemia, starts by tracing Jakub Procházka’s space flight to Chopra, a cosmic dust cloud of which he, as the Czech Republic’s fictional first astronaut, is meant to return to earth with samples. It’s 2018; France has recently parted ways with the EU, and Jakub’s flight, an emblem of the kind of capitalism that has emerged in the wake of Soviet communism, is sponsored by consumer electronics companies and manufacturers of dental hygiene products. This is a funny novel, a satire questioning the country the Czech Republic has become, but it does so from love, its wary eye always on the American and Western-European sources of the Republic’s kind of capitalism.

  But it’s also a novel that incorporates sadness as great in size as it is individual in scale. This is the sadness of Central European history, and thus of winners and losers switching roles in a moment. Jakub, a child of the Velvet Revolutions, returns repeatedly to 1989, to his grandparents’ village and his disgraced and now deceased father, a powerful member of the secret police. The book’s tonal complexity is best illustrated by Kalfar’s wildest creation: Hanuš, a space alien who, between famished handfuls of the Nutella he finds aboard Jakub’s spacecraft, helps our hero process his pain—accumulated grief and lost love—while Jakub himself shows the wise spider, who at first seems so stoic, how to face down mortality.

  In this exchange lies the novel’s emotional core: how to live with the disappointments wrought by love and history, death and politics, in a way that accepts, even affirms them as the very stuff out of which life is stitched? On top of his comic eye and charming prose, it’s his unique view of this struggle—to become a less flawed animal by admitting that the unwanted, the rejected and repressed lie at the very core of our lives—that makes Kalfar’s first novel so remarkable.

  I interviewed Kalfar at a bar in Brooklyn. Please note that the following interview “contains spoilers.”

  Alec Niedenthal (Rail): So where did the spark for this book come from?

  Jaroslav Kalfar: It was initially a short story. I started writing it right before I came to New York. It was about an American spaceman, astronaut, stranded in orbit while his wife filed for divorce. Short, funny story. While I was in Jonathan Foer’s class, he asked me why I wasn’t writing about the Czech Republic. I said I wanted to. That’s what I wanted to do most. And he said, ‘Well, the astronaut should be Czech.’ That was when it all clicked.

  Rail: Was it in the first person initially? Did it have a similar voice?

  Kalfar: Well, not really. It was more of a caricature of an American astronaut, handsome—

  Rail: And the transition from American to Czech added depth?

  Kalfar: Sort of. I began to care about the character. Went from a caricature to a man who had real issues.

  Rail: Was that due to lengthening the piece or changing his nationality?

  Kalfar: It was because I changed him to something that was close to me and that I really wanted to write about a lot.

  Rail: While you were working on the first draft, how did you handle the narrative distance you would take from this narrator? How did you handle seeing yourself in the character as opposed to his previous incarnation? Was it ever troublesome to you? Should I identify, not identify, etc.? Was that ever a tightrope walk you had to do?

  Kalfar: When it comes to Jakub the main character, it was never that difficult. The author will always share some obsessions or fears, but when it came to the difficulties it was mostly with the grandfather character, who was the only link that I make from the book to my personal life; he was modeled after my own grandfather. On a larger level, I wanted this book to be a love letter to the Czech Republic, but I wanted to look at hang-ups that come from our history, and what kind of country we aspire to be in spite of those hang-ups. It was hard at times to decide, ‘Am I being too harsh on my country? Or am I not being harsh enough?’ Where to go with the satire.

  Rail: ‘Mission sponsor.’ You play that note just enough times and then put it aside for a hundred pages and then bring the joke back. So the kind of tightrope walk you were doing was more—how best to express your feeling for your home. Being true to it, not totally one thing, earnest, satirical, etc.

  Kalfar: And when your expected audience is the American audience—and America doesn’t have an extensive deep relationship with the Czech Republic—it also felt like I’m talking about my country to a readership that is not necessarily familiar with it. So how do I talk about it.

  Rail: I think one of the things the book does best, one of its central components, is that it switches between a now and then, a past and present. Intuitively I wouldn’t think it would be seamless, the way you switch between the Czech Republic at the fall of the Soviet Union and the present tense of the Czech Republic in 2018, but it’s a great way to create a pause, a suspended moment—a thrill. Was that a challenge? How did you deal with the structure of that so it felt organic? For instance, when Jakub is suspended in this near-death state in Chopra, and we hurtle back into the past and the moment “freezes.” And Hanuš and Jakub sort of merge consciousnesses. You pause the present and retreat to the past.

  Kalfar: One of the biggest challenges of the book for sure. When I was thinking about the initiation of the big bang, which is what they [the protagonist and his companion, Hanuš] go through, I wanted to see what the most significant moment was in their lives—in Jakub’s life and in Hanuš’s life. It was especially hard because the reader is never sure whether Hanuš is real or not. So there is doubly this question, ‘How do I introduce the background of this character who may or may not exist?’ But with Jakub it was easier because I had gotten to know Lenka, his wife, by then, so it was easier to bring her in while they were suspended in the big bang [Chopra, a pivotal event in the book]. There was a lot of debate with my editor about that scene. That was the scene that took the most trouble to get right.

  Rail: Because of like, how do you get the reader to invest or not in a character that may be a figment? The book is playing with sci-fi without playing by the sci-fi rulebook. In the sense that it would’ve felt out of place if we had, for instance, gone to Hanuš’s planet for some time and explored this other form of life. The book is more about madness. I was also wondering about the beginning. Jakub is treated so comically at the beginning. It’s a subtle process. It becomes less funny as the narrative goes on—not in a bad way, of course. Was that a natural development in his voice?

  Kalfar: It really was, yes. The beginning really is as satirical as the book gets. It’s the Czech Republic, a country of ten million that has just become capitalist a little bit ago, all of a sudden they have a space program and they have sent a man into space and he has agreed to this insanity, which will most likely kill him. The Czechs have this tendency to react to the most dire circumstances with humor. So it felt important to start the book humorously. Not only because it made sense for the nation and the character, but it seemed like the reader would be willing to stick around for the conceit at the beginning to get to the stuff that happens later. The more far away he gets from his home, the more dire it gets, and the more serious he becomes as a character.

  Rail: It’s hard to write a book about this and not learn a lot about how you feel about your home—maybe things you didn’t know before. Do you find that to be true, that there are things about the Czech Republic but hadn’t addressed in your conscious life?

  Kalfar: That was one of the biggest reasons that led me to write this book. There were things I wanted to talk about, with my American friends, about my country, and it’s difficult—friends who care about me, about where I’m from and what I’m like because of where I come from, it’s hard to care about a place so far away, a place you don’t hear about that much in the news, that’s not significant with respect to anything besides the Velvet Revolution hat happened in 1989. This was a way for me to talk about the Czech Republic as it was and as it is right now to international readers who might otherwise not be interested in reading about it.

  Rail: There’s a sharp political edge to the book. You don’t pull any punches when it comes to the Communists. Same with the ridiculous post-1989 capitalist cronyism. There’s a lot of contemporary EU politics in the book as well. There’s a line in the book about France leaving the EU in 2018. Is that on your mind when you’re writing the book? The EU? What role does the Czech Republic play in the EU?

  Kalfar: I did an interview today, my first Czech interview. They asked me the same question. I think we had a chance to play a significant role in preserving and improving it. Obviously the EU has a lot of problems that need to be resolved. I think a lot of those problems are due to the fact that many of the member countries are not picking up the slack—my country is one of them. So was Britain. Eventually Britain said, ‘You know what, we’re just going to quit.’ Which is in my opinion not the right way to go. My next book considers the Czech role in the future of Europe a whole lot more than this book. In this book I wanted to portray where the current model of capitalism was headed, trying to mimic America and England…

  Rail: What do you mean by certain members not taking up the slack?

  Kalfar: Debating too much whether they should stay in or not. Instead they should be debating things such as, should there be elections for the EU Parliament. Which there are not right now. What should be required of the member states and should certain member states be able to dictate what is required more than other states. The EU functions on a democratic socialist model in the first place. So maybe there is something wrong with the fact that Germany is able to dictate so much more how the EU runs than, say, the Czech Republic or Greece or Italy.

  Rail: These debtor nations to northwestern Europe.

  Kalfar: It’s a distribution of power that is problematic to me. That’s not what the founding idea was.

  Rail: Not ever-closer union, definitely. So with a character like Shoe Man [the novel’s villain], you’re reckoning with that. The history of Central and Eastern Europe.

  Kalfar: Yes. He’s a perfectly innocent human being, just wanted to be a scholar, but got caught up in political process and then chewed up by… because of the cruelty and thirst for revenge he acquires because of politics, he becomes this—he’ll be anyone. In this way he resembles Jakub’s father, who will also be anyone.

  Rail: The novel casts some sort of judgment on someone like Shoe Man. I wouldn’t say he gets a reprieve but he’s humanized, his bad actions are made understandable. Do you think to the extent that Jakub chooses not to perpetuate this cycle of violence—at the end of the novel he’s traumatized and trying to be alone and distance himself from this sweep of history, which has just been fucking him psychologically his whole life—what attracts you about that kind of hero? That kind of protagonist? Where at the end he doesn’t get something, acquire something, but subtracts himself.

  Kalfar: Jakub, just like his father, is pressured to be a certain way by the currents of history, by the people in his life who tried to manipulate him to be a certain way or another… I wanted him to be the first person he knew to just withdraw and give himself a moment of peace to think about the man he wanted to be. Because his father never did that. Neither did Shoe Man. They were both reactionists. They just reacted to whatever was happening to them. That kind of character is interesting to me. We once again live in a reactionary period in human history. It’s a trend. I was interested in a man who despite everything that happens to him, and he had ever right and reason to come up to Lenka and say, hey, I’m back, what are you going to do about that; he had every reason to try to murder Shoe Man; but a person who actually tries to detach himself from history and just repair himself and think for a while.

  Rail: At the same time he’s someone who—it’s interesting it’s such a propulsive novel, the voice is very charming at the beginning, and in a lot of contemporary readable novels there’s a lot of action very quickly; that’s what you’re supposed to do when you open a novel. This one doesn’t do that very much. You break up the stillness of the beginning with memory, but—as a writer, I ask this question—did you ever feel anxious about the lack of ‘action’ at the beginning, dialogue, etc.?

  Kalfar: Coming from the background that I have—the Czech novel, the Central European novel, maybe the European novel in general has a tendency to focus on character over plot. I was never all that concerned with, is this moving along quickly? Is it not moving along quickly? My initial interest was in trapping Jakub in that vessel and then seeing what develops from there. Plot is always a concern, it’s one of the reasons people read books, it’s the series of events but it happened organically. If the right move was to watch Jakub in training first, I would’ve done it. But it felt like trapping him at his loneliest and most scared that he’s ever been seemed like the right move to get him to the place where he will—we will be concerned with him as a character, but he’ll start thinking about the past that got him there.

  Rail: Which is how you balance the not-as-plot-heavy beginning. So much of the plot development is character. And you do see yourself in that tradition you just described, the Central European novel. Do you feel there’s a way you approach storytelling that’s different from the way that other people did at NYU [your MFA program]?

  Kalfar: Big question. It’s hard to talk about it in terms of literary background. What does being an American writer even mean anymore? But to talk specifically about workshop, I felt I was more engaged in the character and the natural progression of character rather than coming up with a catchy plot that would get readers into the work. There might be an unfortunate emphasis on that in MFA programs. We can’t fault publishers for wanting to give readers a good taste of, this is the journey you’re going on. This is the difference we have to place on people who publish on the work and people who write them. It’s an especially terrible idea because no one really knows what sells. The publishers have some numbers on their side, but a writer never knows what’s going to sell. That’s not a thing.

  Rail: Something interesting happens in the second half of the book. Maybe a consequence of Jakub being forced into other situations with humans. His moral compass changes. He almost dies. That experience is traumatizing obviously. But then he causes several people to die. That’s something that’s really weighty. You handle it pretty deftly, you dispatch with it quickly. Not melodramatically. How do you make that switch—from this sensitive soul to someone who’s capable of killing people?

  Kalfar: That scene took a lot of time. I started thinking about the kinds of things people do in order to survive. You have people jumping walls to get to safety. Lifting cars. I was thinking, Jakub wants to get back home, and this threat of where he could end up if he doesn’t do anything seemed too hard to bear for him. He wanted to be free, also, he always wanted to be free. And his father was sort of captivated by this Soviet propaganda. He wants to get as far from that as he possibly can. Because of his thoughts—thinking I’m going to be a prisoner, this is what is going to happen to me: it wasn’t any kind of premeditated murder or anything. He said, I’m going to try to alter the course of my life a little bit, especially after he spent so much time being on a straight course on a mission that was determined for him. And yeah he made that decision. One of the reasons why he is the way he is at the end is that he did cause the death of people. When I imagine that for myself I imagine I’d want to retreat and rethink what kind of human being I am.

  Rail: That makes sense. It’s something I would have never predicted it for him, I think. But he has a free choice, in my perspective. I also found it interesting how—I love the scene where he goes to talk to Lenka and she doesn’t show up. It’s clear to the reader she won’t show up. But you do it in a way where it’s clear what you’re doing but I still accept it and find it funny and sad. Were there any questions in that scene—am I being too obvious? Too subtle? Those kind of questions.

  Kalfar: That scene was the second most difficult. Just because where it is in the timeline, I had a version of that scene in workshop in my first year at NYU—four-and-a-half years ago. I went through everything, Jakub talking to Lenka, her telling him she was divorcing him over Skype, I had a lawyer telling him… initially I kept going toward the make it funny, make it satirical as much as you can idea, but eventually I said Jakub is a person, and this is important news he receives, and how he receives it and how he reacts to it determine much of the rest of the book. So I reached sort of a subtle approach. Lenka sort of disappears. Which also made sense because Lenka is an introvert. She escapes and tries to make sense of it herself, just like Jakub escapes into space to make sense of the things that are haunting him.

  Rail: You place more of the weight on how he’s preparing for the date. Dressing up, doing things very differently. You spent so much time exploring his emotional and mental states in that moment that I didn’t care that I knew what was going to happen. Or sensed, intuited it. Because there’s so much care for him, for showing the reader how much this moment means to him—it’s going to save his relationship in his mind. So it seems difficult as a writer to take small things in an individual’s life and use them to talk about the history of Soviet Communism in the Czech Republic. An accumulation of small memories, but you’re talking about something very weighty. When you started this did you know you wanted to get down a record about historical experience?

  Kalfar: One of the top concerns for me was to study—there’s a lot of guilt in my country over the communist years, who collaborated, who did what. Everyone looks at it from the point of view of the righteous, the people who didn’t collaborate. I was interested in families of people who did collaborate. Jakub’s father collaborated because he thought he was building a better world for his son—in the same way that the worst criminals in history, the Nazis, were. I was interested in looking at it from the point of view of a family member who grew up thinking, dad is doing that, dad is being a hero—and then realizing, no, dad was a criminal, and he was a horrible person who did awful things to other people. When looking at the personal history of Jakub, I wanted his family to be on the wrong side of that history. Not only to give him a reason to want to make up for it, but because you don’t encounter those stories all that much.

  Rail: But his father isn’t a collaborator because of the graft. He believes in the communist cause.

  Kalfar: He’s not just a sadist or an opportunist. Which is the saddest person of them all, the guy who got suckered into hurting other people…

  Rail: Why did you decide to have him die in an accident rather than stand trial?

  Kalfar: I didn’t want Jakub’s father to have any opportunity to justify him directly.

  Rail: Why?

  Kalfar: Too easy.

  Rail: And Hanuš comes around as a replacement for Lenka, Jakub’s wife. He and Jakub have this kind of bromance. Why did you decide to make him a spider? How do you deal with him being, potentially, a character who seems like he ‘knows the truth’—the one who seems when he’s introduced to know more of the truth than the other characters? Those kinds of characters can easily become containers for the author’s personal philosophy. But he doesn’t become that. How did you balance Hanuš needing to teach Jakub something about getting over his earth life and also not having him be a dispenser of truth?

  Kalfar: Why is he a spider? The village of Jakub’s grandparents is based on the village of my grandparents. Whenever I thought about things a lot, or grieved, I lay on the couch and looked at the ceiling—and there were a lot of daddy longlegs spiders up there. I came to associate them with wisdom. I looked up there and there they were, minding their own business.
  As for Hanus as a truth-teller—I think the significance of him really is in what he does learn from human beings. It seems that he comes perfectly prepared for the illogical tendencies of human beings. Let’s say someone is afraid of death. Well, fuck you, you shouldn’t be, it happens, that’s what happens; that could be the logical response. The fact he is so well-equipped to resist all the human contradictions and then he falls into them anyway, and becomes a believer in this human… I don’t know what to call it. The human contradictions. The fact that he becomes afraid of the same things that human beings are afraid of. I wanted him to be kind of a skeptical character at first. Skeptical, cold, an alien creature who’d say, “None of what you do makes sense.” I wanted a creature who would be willing to fall victim to the spell of how we’re human. That doesn’t make anything any more logical. But I found charm in this creature who would fall for it anyway.

  Rail: The presence of Russians in the book. Laika the dog. The Russian spacecraft. One of those weird moments in literature where you’re talking about a larger symbolic relationship, the one between Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, but you’re doing it with real language and real characters—in high school English class they would call this symbolism, because one thing is standing for a larger thing outside of it. There’s obviously so much political gamesmanship right now, but did those scenes feel very politically charged? Like Jakub in front of the Russian spaceship?

  Kalfar: The past few years, the intentions of Russia have been very clearly stated—their interference in the rest of Europe. There is still very much this concern in Eastern and Southern European countries about the influence Russia wants over them. And I wanted to portray that especially because after the end of the Cold War, a lot of countries think that it’s all over and those countries are liberated and free to do as they want—which has never really been true. When the Bush administration wanted to install an anti-nuclear device in the Czech Republic, they were drawing up the contract and the Russian cut off the natural gas supply to us. There have been many incidents like that in Poland, in Ukraine.

  Rail: That was how the incursion in Georgia started, right?

  Kalfar: Also that invasion, right. So I wanted to portray that relationship. Despite the Czech Republic being a looking-ahead capitalist country, we’re still looking at the specter of Russian communism, the Russians looking to regain those territories and looking to have the Slavs united as a single nation which to me is the most terrifying thing in the world.

  Rail: And you see Jakub develop a personal relationship with the Russian astronaut who saves him—and then politics literally tears them apart. History tears them apart too. As friends or whatever they were going to be, there’s no getting beyond that, history, politics. I’m sure you have Russian friends, but… do you think that’s part of the geopolitical essence of Russia? Can Eastern, Southern and Central Europe and Russia ever be friends?

  Kalfar: I don’t think the countries of Russia and Czech Republic can be friends anytime soon. Russia’s interests are not in the interests of the Czech Republic. But then again, the interests of the Czech Republic are maybe not in the best interest of America… which is what I was trying to talk about in terms of the determinations of small countries in the book. What do small countries do who are caught up with superpowers and are trying to determine their own fates?

• Writer's Bone - http://www.writersbone.com/interviewsarchive/2017/4/27/surprise-and-discovery-10-questions-with-ispaceman-of-bohemiai-author-jaroslav-kalfar

  APRIL 27, 2017
  Surprise and Discovery: 10 Questions With Spaceman of Bohemia Author Jaroslav Kalfar

  Jaroslav Kalfar
  Jaroslav Kalfar

  By Daniel Ford

  I have so many thoughts about Jaroslav Kalfar’s truly terrific debut novel Spaceman of Bohemia, but, alas, I must wait for next Friday’s #NovelClass discussion with Dave Pezza.

  In the meantime, enjoy my interview with the author, who graciously talked to me about how he caught the writing bug, listening to his characters shout over each other in his head, and what inspired Spaceman of Bohemia.
  spaceman-of-bohemia-book-cover
  Daniel Ford: What led you to storytelling?

  Jaroslav Kalfar: I caught the bug early on, when I was about six. My father had an extensive collection of horror and sci-fi videotapes, and those were the gateway to books. I was in awe of how much stories could move and shape a person (even the small, undeveloped person I was back then!), and I wanted to try my hand at creating stories myself. I started with “X-Files” fan fiction, and soon gathered the confidence to make up my own narratives.

  DF: You’ve been an avid reader since you were a kid. Who were some of your early influences?

  JK: The above-mentioned videotapes and “X-Files” led me to exploring the small library of my grandparents—Robinson Crusoe, any Jules Verne I could find. Those were the early days. Then I discovered Tolkien, Pratchett, and LeGuin in middle school, and eventually reached the likes of Kundera, Dostoevsky, Dickens, the truly “serious” stuff. I’m so grateful now that my reading diet was so varied right from the start. I didn’t care about “genre” or “literary,” I just wanted to get my hands on any good book.

  DF: When you actually sit down to write, what’s your process like? Do you outline, listen to music, consult with cosmic spider?

  JK: I’m not a big fan of outlining. I mark the spot on the map I need to get to with light pencil, maybe. But the joy of writing for me is in constant surprise and discovery. If I know exactly where I’m going, I will lose interest quickly. As for the physical act of writing, most of time it’s in my office, with shades drawn, and in complete silence so I can hear the characters in my head shout over each other. I absolutely consult with a cosmic spider, even though he eats all my food, the glutton.

  DF: What inspired Spaceman of Bohemia?

  JK: I’ve always been fascinated with loneliness, its contradictions, how people experience it so differently. It seemed like there was no greater place to study loneliness than within the confines of space. But I also wanted to write about my country, its democratic aspirations and historical hang-ups. Astronaut as character seemed so well poised for both. In space, the astronaut is subject to inconveniences, anxieties, perfect isolation, but on Earth, the astronaut is thought of as hero, symbol, embodiment of aspiration and progress. Within Spaceman were summarized my biggest obsessions, those I wanted in the first book.

  DF: Space can offer an endless canvas, but you illustrate perfectly that humans are still bound by their limitations even if they’re soaring through the heavens. How did you decide on the structure of the novel?

  JK: The structure was bit of an accident, as it sometimes happens. Initially I was not going to dedicate whole scenes to Jakub’s past on Earth, only include small fragments here and there. But the past became so crucial to why Jakub had undertaken the mission, and it became equally important to me that the Czech Republic and Jakub’s life there was as alive, vivid, and exciting as anything happening in space. There just comes a point when the book dictates exactly what it needs, and everything comes together (this makes the process sound mystical and somehow automatic, but, of course, to come to that point, one must undergo hundreds of hours of frustration and discarded drafts).

  DF: Letting go of characters and stories can be hard, especially for debut novelists. Was it tough saying goodbye to them?

  JK: The hardest part was making the decision of “this is the final draft, time to take my hands off.” There is always something to fix, a different way to express something about a character. I also had some tough times while writing the novel, personal troubles, health issues, and Jakub, Hanus, and Lenka certainly became a way for me to be elsewhere away from those problems. I miss that, the act of just sitting in a room and talking to them (particularly to Hanus—he provided the same comforts for me that he provided for Jakub, that clever spider), but I am even more excited that their story is out in the world now, existing independently of me. That’s the dream.

  DF: You can’t read your novel or your backstory without thinking about the current political situation in the United States. You say in your promotional material that “America felt limitless” when you came here when you were a kid. Do you still feel that way or are you as disillusioned as the rest of us trying to figure this mess out?

  JK: I’m grateful for my Czech upbringing, as it taught me to face history with good humor. But I have to say that this is the least good humor I’ve ever had. America is certainly not limitless, in fact, it is victim to its own insistence on exceptionalism. It was interesting to at once watch Donald Trump’s ascent to power, Russia’s new machinations in Europe and Middle East, and the beginning of fragmentation in the EU after Brexit. It’s an unexpected U-turn toward an uglier, messier time, and I was as caught off-guard as everyone else. But I will say one thing about America: the people, the artists, the thinkers who have been coming forward to resist the new political reality are giving me great hope. Perhaps I’ll gain some of that good humor back.

  DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

  JK: Working on the next one! Focusing on new projects has helped a great deal with the publication anxiety. I’ve two big things on the docket—one a sprawling novel cutting across history (much further back than Spaceman), while the other is a small, intimate book about modern love and the multiverse. We’ll see which one I finish first.

  DF: What’s your advice for aspiring authors?

  JK: Write the damn thing, then check to see if it’s the best version of itself. If not, write a better version, or write something else. Readers are amazing and we owe them this much.

  DF: Can you name one random fact about yourself?

  JK: I genuinely dislike coffee. I think it’s just awful. It has been surprising to some people, since the Spaceman cover features a giant beautiful coffee cup.

  To learn more about Jaroslav Kalfar, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @JaroslavKalfar. Tune into #NovelClass next Friday to hear our discussion about Spaceman of Bohemia.

• Extra Crispy - http://www.extracrispy.com/culture/2299/how-author-jaroslav-kalfar-does-breakfast

  How Author Jaroslav Kalfar Does Breakfast
  When in space, dip the Tatranky in the Nutella

  MEREDITH TURITS March 08, 2017
  CULTUREBOOKSBACON
  Jaroslav Kalfař has spent a lot of time thinking about Nutella in space. That may seem pretty strange, but these things happen when you've spent the last few years writing and editing a novel set mostly on a spaceship bound for Venus, with late nights occasionally fueled by jumbo-sized jars of chocolate-hazelnut spread. Maybe like Jakub, the contemplative astronaut at the center of author Kalfař's debut, Spaceman of Bohemia, you, too, would want to make sure that whoever stocked the cabinets for your solo mission to Deep Space didn't skimp on the Nutella.

  If this all sounds delightfully strange, then good. You'll like Spaceman. The novel is a supercharged, voice-driven romp that brings readers to the outer reaches of the galaxy as well as into the Czech countryside for love, fame, and freshly slaughtered bacon. Twenty-eight-year-old Kalfař joined Extra Crispy on the morning of his book release at Industry City's Extraction Lab, not far from his Brooklyn home, to talk breakfast and unexpectedly defend his preference for Canadian bacon. ("Fuck the haters," he says, with the utmost respect.)

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  By Margaret Eby
  Posted in Culture

  IMAGE COURTESY OF JAROSLAV KALFAŘ
  Extra Crispy: I want to start with Nutella.
  Jaroslav Kalfař: As a child growing up in the Czech Republic, my family would have these buffet-style breakfasts with salamis, cheeses, rolls, butter, tea, coffee, and the staple was Nutella. One of my favorite breakfasts when I was a kid was to take a roll and just slather it with Nutella and then put a bunch of Swiss cheese on it. It sounds weird, but I recommend trying it. It's that's sweet-savory kind of thing.

  Do you do that here?
  I don't do it in public.

  I read in an interview with Flavorwire that you write late into the night. When do you end up eating breakfast as a result?
  Usually between 11 a.m. and noon. That's my first hour of the day. I don't look at my phone yet. I get up, I make black tea—Earl Grey, English Breakfast with honey—and it really depends what day it is. On workout days, I make four-egg omelets and eat them with bacon or Canadian bacon usually to get the protein going. On non-workout days, I can be a little more flexible. I can splurge on a bagel. Not very often because my youthful metabolism has gone. I just had that transition in the past year where carbs are suddenly an issue. Or I like soups for breakfast once it a while—French onion, which is kind of odd, I guess.

  How Parquet Courts Bassist Sean Yeaton Does Breakfast
  By Hanson O'Haver
  Posted in Culture
  How Jonathan Lethem Does Breakfast
  By Margaret Eby
  Posted in Culture
  Heidi Julavits did a piece about soup for breakfast for us for our launch. Is this a writer thing?
  Maybe! It's delicious and it's comforting in the morning when you have to get out of bed and get out into the world and do whatever it is you do.

  Wait, though. I want to go back to Canadian bacon. Why Canadian bacon?
  Because it's leaner. It's got a little less fat and a little more protein. And it's still delicious.

  Can you explain it? We asked a bunch of Canadians, and it didn't go perfectly well.
  It comes a different part of the pig... and that's all I know. I should know, because my grandfather used to slaughter pigs, and I used to help him carve them up. He would be ashamed of me. I think it's from the butt somewhere?

  If your grandfather used to carve up pigs, much like the scenes with Louda in Spaceman of Bohema, do you have an iffy relationship with eating bacon?
  I have a great relationship with eating bacon. During the pig killings, we would cook it all as it was happening—the pig would be sniffing around at you, and then two hours later you would be eating parts of it. So I'm very comfortable with it.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF LITTLE, BROWN
  You were in your teens when you came here. How is American breakfast different than Czech breakfast?
  It's more gluttonous. It's big. Going to Denny's or those classic American breakfast places and eating mounds of pancakes. I never had a pancake before coming to America! I never had waffles. I call it heart-attack breakfast.

  Did you keep Czech habits for fall into Americanized ones?
  I landed somewhere in between. I definitely eat a bigger breakfast, and I eat the American staples of bacon and eggs, but I've had to take it easy on the waffles. But cereal—that's the strangest thing to me. There's a whole aisle of cereal, and a culture built around it, and that parents give it to their kids thinking that it's something healthy. But then again, my parents gave me Nutella thinking it was healthy because the commercials said that it has the calcium your kids need.

  Do you always have Nutella around?
  These days, not as much. It's a splurge as well. I definitely have it now—I bought it last week, one of those jumbo jars because I'm letting myself go a little bit.

  And tell me about the idea of taking Nutella into space.
  Well, I just thought about if I were shot into space all by my lonesome, what would I be wanting to eat? What would be my comforts? I came up with Nutella and whiskey, and at the beginning Jakub also mentions that candy, Tatranky—those are pretty much my three favorite things in the world. I regret that at no point I have him dip the Tatranky in the Nutella. That's a missed opportunity.

  Is that something you do?
  As of last week, yes. Stress eating.

  This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

• Jaroslav Kalfar Home Page - http://jaroslavkalfar.com/about/

  About

  Jaroslav Kalfař was born one year before the Velvet Revolution in Prague, Czech Republic. He immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen and learned the English language through novels and cartoons. He has earned an MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and a nominee for the inaugural E.L. Doctorow Prize.

  He lives in Brooklyn. Spaceman of Bohemia is his first novel.

Intergalactic Spider Included
Jennifer Senior
The New York Times. (Mar. 9, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Full Text:
SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIABy Jaroslav Kalfar276 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $26.

All new books, but debut novels especially, are blind dates. The raconteur who charmingly burbles during drinks is tapped out of stories by the time the oysters arrive; the genius who wears his erudition so lightly over appetizers starts clubbing you over the head with it during dessert. (No, your mind screams when things turn. And it was all going so well.)

I start a lot of debut novels in this job. Most betray me at some point or another -- though a few make my heart do cartwheels, or at least a pirouette.

Jaroslav Kalfar's ''Spaceman of Bohemia'' is not a perfect first effort. But it's a frenetically imaginative one, booming with vitality and originality when it isn't indulging in the occasional excess. Kalfar's voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks. He has a great snout for the absurd. He has such a lively mind and so many ideas to explore that it only bothered me a little -- well, more than a little, but less than usual -- that this book peaked two-thirds of the way through. Sigh. Don't we all.

The cast of this production is small. The spaceman of the title is Jakub Prochazka, a Czech astrophysicist who, as the book opens in 2018, launches into space from a state-owned potato field. Just 18 months earlier, a comet from a neighboring galaxy had swept into the Milky Way, bringing with it a cloud of intergalactic dust that permanently ''bathed Earth's nights in purple zodiacal light, altering the sky we had known since the birth of man.''

The cloud was unbudging, and therefore unnerving. Then it started to consume itself. Someone had to investigate. The Czech Republic is the first country to offer a human to hoover up particle samples. So away Jakub goes, seeking honor for his country and redemption of his family name. Before the Velvet Revolution, his father had been a member of the Communist Party's secret police.

''Your father was a collaborator, a criminal, a symbol of what haunts the nation to this day,'' says the senator who recruits Jakub for the journey. ''As his son, you are the movement forward, away from the history of our shame.''

But solitary space travel -- eight months in Jakub's case; four out and four back -- is not without its problems. It is hell on his marriage, for instance. Thirteen weeks into his voyage, Jakub's wife, Lenka, leaves him, occasioning a major reckoning with his motives for undertaking such a dangerous mission. (It also gives him many excuses to drain his stash of whiskey. Deep space is no place to experience marital strife.)

Space travel is also hard on Jakub psychologically. At roughly the same moment that his wife leaves, a monstrous, hairy spider appears on the spaceship. For a while, we assume that it's a hallucination, a companion spun from Jakub's lonely imagination. (His state-appointed psychologist had warned him about such things. ''I need to sleep you off,'' Jakub tells the spider. ''Like a stomachache.'') But soon, we begin to suspect: Perhaps this creature is real?

Here it becomes clear that Kalfar has much larger aims with ''Spaceman of Bohemia'' than to write a spry, madcap work of speculative fiction. The giant spider has ready access to Jakub's unconscious, and ransacks it repeatedly, releasing a cascade of defining memories: of Jakub's falling in love with his wife; of his parents' deaths when he was 10; of watching his grandparents endure humiliation and hardship to raise him. The spaceman becomes the most far-flung analysand in the solar system.

Many of these memories are inseparable from the history of the Czech Republic, and the book becomes, as much as anything, a rumination on that history, both recent and distant. Among Jakub's most painful recollections are those of his family's participation in the brutal workings of the state. (I won't reveal his father's specific role, but it's one of the book's most involving and satisfyingly realized story lines.)

The desperate desire to become his father's opposite, we slowly see, is what has propelled Jakub into space. He believed he was the biological carrier of his father's curse -- ''the last remnant of Cain's sperm'' -- which meant he had no choice, really, but to lead a life of spectacular repentance. A psychoanalyst might say his fate was overdetermined.

Kalfar has an exhilarating flair for imagery. (''What good am I, a thin purse of brittle bones and spoiling meat?'' Jakub wonders to himself after his parents die.) He writes boisterously and mordantly, like a philosophy grad student who's had one too many vodka tonics at the faculty Christmas wingding.

This is generally a good thing, though it can also mean periodic forays into pretentiousness. In raking through the contents of Jakub's mind, the spider makes a study of human beings more generally -- the pain of our individuality comes as quite a shock -- and some of its observations about ''humanry'' can be self-satisfied, grating; the book is just sturdy enough to withstand its most irritating declamations without collapse.

The fate of Jakub's marriage, the spider, the voyage into space -- they all get their moments, but not all of them get their proper due; at the very end, there are philosophy and more soliloquizing where resolutions ought to be. That such speechifying can be forgiven says something about Kalfar's wild imagination, his ingenuity, his heart.

Endings are just so very hard. Kalfar, if I had to guess, is from the E. L. Doctorow school of writing: You let your characters guide you. (''You never see further than your headlights,'' Doctorow once told The Paris Review, ''but you can make the whole trip that way.'') The problem is that headlights in deep space don't really work. Unless the light bounces off something, it simply gets swallowed up in the dark.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS (PHOTOGRAPH BY GRACE ANN LEADBEATER)

Kalfar, Jaroslav. Spaceman of Bohemia
Henry Bankhead
Library Journal.
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p72.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Kalfar, Jaroslav. Spaceman of Bohemia. Little, Brown. Mar. 2017. 288p. ISBN 9780316273435. $26; ebk. ISBN
9780316273404. F
Debut novelist Kalfar offers the near-future tale of the first Czech space mission, designed to explore an enigmatic
cosmic dust cloud located somewhere between Venus and Earth. Lone spaceman Jakub Prochazka has always struggled
with the burden of being the child of a former party member and operative for the Soviet-backed Communist regime,
and this story alternates between the present-day space adventure and Jakub's life before and after the Velvet
Revolution. Integral to the narrative is the appearance of a man who was tortured by Jakub's father as well as the
complications of Jakub's marriage to Lenka. The ongoing psychological challenge of the long space flight, Jakub's
deteriorating relationship with Lenka, a surprising discovery of galactic proportions, and a narrow escape from death
will keep readers highly engaged. VERDICT Jakub's coming-of-age story and improbable space flight combine to
create an exhilarating concoction of history, social commentary, and irony. Reading like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001
crossed with a Milan Kundera novel, set in a Philip K. Dick universe, with a nod to Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, it
manages to be singularly compelling while still providing mass appeal. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert,
10/3/16.]--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bankhead, Henry. "Kalfar, Jaroslav. Spaceman of Bohemia." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301206&it=r&asid=9869f01749ec902e32d820ea3c182a09.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Spaceman of Bohemia
Melissa Brown
BookPage.
(Mar. 2017): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA
By Jaroslav Kalfar
Little, Brown
$26, 288 pages
ISBN 9780316273435
eBook available
SCIENCE FICTION
When a comet drive-by leaves a cloud of purple dust in space, altering the familiar view from Earth, the collective
response of the nations, of course, is to reach it: to explore, collect, research. The Czechs rocket a man to the Chopra
cloud first, sending professor of astrophysics Jakub Prochazka as their first astronaut. Thus Spaceman of Bohemia
begins with a proud achievement for a country so battered by the machinations of others, now making momentous
history of its own.
Several weeks after Jakub's solitary launch, a (possibly imaginary) memory-probing space spider appears aboard the
JanHus1 space shuttle. The spider, whom Jakub names Hanus after a medieval astronomical clock maker from Prague,
probes his thoughts and eats his Nutella in his own scientific exploration to learn about "humanry." Jakub unearths his
childhood fears surrounding the fall of the Communist Party, who his father informed for, and memories: his move to
Prague with his grandparents to start anew, his chance first meeting with wife Lenka over whiskey and sausages, their
consuming love affair. Now, however, they are estranged, literally, by space and time, and maybe something more
permanent.
As Jakub travels farther into the depths of space, he reminisces and philosophizes with Hanus. Themes of freedom,
death, the fleetingness of life, violence, oppression, lust and love, revenge, legacy and fear link together the memories
along his life's path, from his youth through his university years and the now fateful decision to become the Spaceman
of Bohemia.
Set in a not-so-distant 2018, the first novel by Czech-American author Jaroslav Kalfar defies neat categorization. It is
both an adoring ode to and an insider's critique of the land of Bohemia, chronicling its past subjugations and future
possibilities. It's irreverent and thoughtful, tragic and comic, deadpan and poignant. Writing outside his native tongue,
the author creates vivid, occasionally disturbing vignettes. Spaceman Jakub's rhetorical questions do become tedious at
points in the novel; at times, his wonderings overwhelm, making it hard for the reader to digest one round before Kalfar
moves on to other musings.
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Though the narrative seems to come full circle, it felt slightly unfinished, abruptly truncated. These caveats, and my
personal arachnophobia aside, Spaceman of Bohemia entertains and enlightens.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Brown, Melissa. "Spaceman of Bohemia." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 18+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701838&it=r&asid=38a6bc13b72d3e6aa2fb3575207adb4c.
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Spaceman of Bohemia
Poornima Apte
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Spaceman of Bohemia. By Jaroslav Kalfar. Mar. 2017. 288p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316273435); e-book, $13.99
(9780316273404).
The Iron Curtain has fallen, and the Czech Republic is hoping to keep its dark history squarely in the rear-view mirror.
A space program exploring Chopra, a mysterious "gassy giant" near Venus, promises to be just the ticket. The country
rests its hopes on the shaky shoulders of Jakub Prochazka, an astrophysicist who signs on only as reparation for his
father's sins as a Communist collaborator. Looking to rewrite his personal history, Jakub becomes the country's first
astronaut, traveling aboard the JanFlusl in the spring of 2018 to conduct experiments on Chopra. Unfortunately, even
space can't untether Jakub from more earthly concerns. Jakub's marriage to Lenka, frayed as it already has been, is
further tested. The unwitting astronaut explores existential questions with his own version of Tom Hanks' "Wilson," a
creature he names Hanus. Cutting to memorable scenes set in small-town Czechoslovakia and, later, in Prague, Kalfar's
absurdist debut eloquently explores the crushing burden of having to carry your father's sins and its effects on a man
whose sole ambition was to live an ordinary existence.--Poornima Apte
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Apte, Poornima. "Spaceman of Bohemia." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442500&it=r&asid=e06e5bc8f105b1509705a37c5e6e4a64.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Spaceman of Bohemia
Publishers Weekly.
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p170.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Spaceman of Bohemia
Jaroslav Kalfar. Little, Brown, $26 (288p)
ISBN 978-0-316-27343-5
A Czech astronaut travels to an interstellar dust cloud in an attempt to redeem his family name in this wonderfully
jubilant and touching debut novel. Beginning with the launch of the spaceship JanHus 1, the novel promptly flashes
back to explore the complex motivations of the titular spaceman, Jakub Prochazka. The son of a Communist
sympathizer who tortured dissidents, Jakub chooses to leave his beloved homeland and wife, Lenka, to bring renown to
the oft-overlooked Czech Republic. Once in space, Jakub encounters a possibly hallucinated alien spider named Hanus,
who interrogates him on philosophies both existential and personal. Through their conversations, Jakub is forced to
confront Lenka's new, seemingly happier life without him, as well as the ghosts of his father's violent past. Their
debates come to a head in the dust cloud Chopra, where Jakub must risk his mission, earthbound life, and contact with
Hanus. Written in an erudite comic style, the novel boldly switches tones like a spacesuit built for multiple planetary
atmospheres: from the historical to the domestic, from out-of-this-world fables to brutal terrestrial reality. Agent:
Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Spaceman of Bohemia." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 170. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195137&it=r&asid=98a1d575816cd261a8e5f87f4cf29662.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Kalfar, Jaroslav: SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kalfar, Jaroslav SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-316-27343-5
Blend Bradbury and Lem with Saint-Exupery and perhaps a little Kafka, and you get this talky, pleasing first novel by
Czech immigrant writer Kalfar. Jakub Prochazka--his name, he insists, is "common" and "simple"--is a man of
numerous fears, including caterpillars and the possibility of an afterlife, "as in the possibility that life could not be
escaped." An astrophysicist with a beautiful if increasingly estranged wife and a father with a fraught past, Jakub is
now pushing the moral equivalent of a giant space broom, collecting cosmic dust for analysis up in the skies on a path
to Venus, where the first astronaut from the Czech Republic can stake a claim to space for a nation that the world
confuses with Chechnya or, in the words of a powerful technocrat, "reduces us to our great affinity for beer and
pornography." The new world in the sky yields many mysteries, among them an arachnoid spider with whom Jakub,
whom the creature calls "skinny human," has extensive conversations about all manner of things even as events on
Earth unfold in ever stranger ways; his wife, Lenka, now has a police tail, and Jakub's wish to reconcile and produce
offspring seems increasingly unlikely. And why does he wish to reproduce? So that, he answers when the creature asks,
he reduces the odds of being a nobody, one of many nicely Kafkaesque nods in a book built on sly, decidedly contrarian
humor. Whether the Nutella-loving creature is really there or some sort of imagined projection ("A hallucination could
not be full of thoughts that had never occurred to me, could it?") remains something of a mystery, but Jakub's torments
and mostly good-natured if baffled responses to them are the real meat of the story. Blending subtle asides on Czech
history, the Cold War, and today's wobbly democracy, Kalfar's confection is an inventive, well-paced exercise in
speculative fiction. An entertaining, provocative addition to the spate of literary near-future novels that have lately hit
the shelves.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kalfar, Jaroslav: SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652420&it=r&asid=53e5b4767fb0318b6348034e5a055a1d.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Spaceman of Bohemia
Kelly Cherry
Hollins Critic.
54.3 (June 2017): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Hollins Critic
http://www.hollins.edu/grad/eng_writing/critic/critic.htm
Full Text:
Spaceman of Bohemia . By Jaroslav Kalfar. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2016. $26.00
The Vow . By Felicity Goodrich. Amazon: Lake Union Publishing, 2016. $14.95 (pa.)
The Hermit Thrush: Poems . By Mark Frutkin. Toronto: Quattro Books, 2015. $18.00 (pa.)
Spaceman of Bohemia , Kalfar's debut novel, is entertaining and unusual. Jakub Prochazka, son of a deceased and hated
Communist, but raised by his loving grandparents post-Velvet-Revolution on a small plot of land in a free and
westernized Czechoslovakia, is chosen to zoom singlehandedly into outer space, where a strange dark blue or purplish
spread of sky has altered the nightly view from earth. Jakub is married and madly in love with his wife, which is one
reason we like him. He is also intelligent and reasonable, perfectly able to carry out his mission, and those are other
reasons for which we like him. The purple streak, or patch, or cloud, is called Chopra. Jakub is expected to enter
Chopra and analyze its chemistry.
In outer space he converses with, or believes he converses with, something like a very tall and sympathetic spider. He
calls this "spider," or perhaps it is a phantom spider, Hanus. Hanus calls Jakub "skinny human." Hanus also tells him
"the greatest truth of the universe," to wit, "the body must not be violated." Hanus raids the refrigerator and learns that
he loves hazelnut Nutella. It is possible that Jakub is experiencing hallucinations but his "relationship" with Hanus
helps the time to pass; it is also a comfort for a lonely spaceman. The "creature" Jakub "sees" is "accompanied by the
unusual odor. My clothing hung around its legs, as if I were a living coat rack; its face and one leg were buried in my
closet, rummaging through, scratching." Jakub and Hanus are soon fast friends.
Secondary to the greatest truth, Hanus says later on, is this one: "Truths must not be feared." This second truth will
resonate for Jakub when he returns to earth.
Not all the action takes place in space. There are chapters that look back on Jakub's life, his grandparents, who live in
Streda, the early days of Jakub's marriage to Lenka and later Lenka's therapeutic visits with the Freudian psychiatrist
Dr. Kurak, who treats her on earth and treats her husband via calls to outer space.
There are a great many lists in this novel, and I feel a need to point out to the author that lists, while they may be
amusing or informative, cannot move a story forward. Indeed, they take us away from it--the story--and leave us
momentarily wondering where we are. If the lists were deleted, Spaceman of Bohemia would be a leaner, faster-moving
tale.
But I want also to say that the final chapters are nothing short of brilliant. You must read them.
*
In The Vow , it is 1944 and the Russians have reached Poland. Three of the Soviet soldiers gang-rape a young woman
named Anna. As many women do, she blames herself. She should not have been out so late at night, she thinks, and she
tells no one what has happened. Alas, morning sickness confirms that she is pregnant. She seeks out the village priest,
on whom she has a crush. Szymon, the priest, is handsome and gentle and, of course, celibate. Anna's mother is one of
those women who always assume the worst of their daughters. Her solution is for her daughter to marry Tomek before
the baby comes. Tomek, a thief and a tough, has wanted to marry Anna since they were children together, but Anna has
other dreams. And Tomek will surprise her with his kindness and charity. Before very long, Anna and Szymon are
sleeping together side by side. Chastely, but closer and closer. Anna's crush is now full-on love and she is no longer
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reluctant to express it. Szymon admires and appreciates Anna, and in time he realizes that he, too, is in love. How this
couple find a way to be together is the heart of the story, and the story is wonderfully involving, even gripping.
I wish I could say the same about the writing. Sadly, there are grammatical mistakes, comma splices, cliches, and
misused words, such as "hung" for "hanged." This is a debut book, and I certainly don't want to trash it, but perhaps the
publisher should have called these matters to the author's attention. Lake Union Publishing is an imprint
ofAmazon.com. Surely they have editors? But maybe not.
The author's name is Felicity Goodrich. This name is so lovely one wonders if it is real or if it is a pen name. Either
way, it is a great name, unforgettable and suggestive of powerful connections. Try saying it out loud. It rolls off the
tongue like something teasingly chocolate, an expensive, lush chocolate. It is a name impossible to forget.
Although we cannot read this book for fine writing, its narrative drive keeps us riveted. I simply did not want to put it
down. Pages fly by. The story has staying power, and if story is what you want, by all means read this book. It ends in
Poznan, that fascinating, ancient, now rebuilt city of commerce, art, and education.
*
There seems to be a divide--I don't know why--between Canadian and American poetry. Only occasionally does a
Canadian collection get the attention it deserves in America. Or maybe I'm wrong, and I am the only American who
knows little about Canadian poetry beyond Margaret Atwood. But then, Margaret Atwood is known everywhere, in part
because she is a dynamite female. This book by a well-published male poet hitherto unknown to me is due its own
audience. The Hermit Thrush is charming and, mostly, cheerful. It is fun to read. And despite not digging into dark
territory or straining our brains, it's smart, aware, sly, and enlightening.
Mark Frutkin has previously published eight books of fiction, three of nonfiction, two of poetry. Now we haveThe
Hermit Thrush . I have myself written a poem about a hennit thrush, and though that poem is neither here nor there, it's
why I read Frutkin's collection. He refers to the hermit thrush only briefly, but I enjoyed his collection so much that I
wanted to tell readers about it.
There are four sections to the book: "Cathedral," "Continuous Longing," "Something Weightless," and "Empty Boats."
Even these simple subject headings evince lyricism and a hint of mystery. A list of "Things Difficult to Accomplish"
begins with "Capture a plum blossom in high wind," suggests that we "Separate the sea from the tears of fish" (Isn't that
wonderful? Has anyone else ever thought of it?), and advises us to "Retrace [our] steps in the river." This is a playful
and astute mind. I have no doubt that this poem will spark other poems in other minds.
Sometimes Frutkin points out the obvious, which we, however, have overlooked: "No one complains about global
warming during January ..." I laughed when I read this line, but it is also sad and nicely cadenced.
Haiku are scattered through the book but the rules about syllables have been thrown out. We might better call them
apercu. They are something like wake-up calls: Wake up and see the two maple leaves falling as if they made a double
helix. Elsewhere we see a button described as "a hard-shelled sea creature with four eyes." And "traffic drives off,
disappearing into itself." And this one, which I love because it is so splendidly visual and yet not visual: "Five dappled
horses suddenly invisible under mottled leaves." He also gives us a list of metaphors and similes that includes "A
barcode of old fence."
Moments such as these may seem simple, but it's not easy to come up with them. If they were, we would hear them all
the time. But we don't. Each is a surprise. Even though every writer ought to know that "Every blank page / is a poem
about snow."
In the section titled "Something Weightless," we encounter moving poems about Michelangelo, Hugo Grotius, and
other historical figures. Each of these poems manages to capture their originality and their feelings. Although
weightlessness is a factor, we feel the weight of the past, feel its heaviness, its deadness, its lostness. These poems are
as approachable as all the others and yet we are acutely aware of the passage of time, the absence of everything that
was. It is remarkable that this poet can take us through so many changes of mood with clarity and simplicity. The poem
"Boatman" shows us Charon, ferryman of the dead, listening to their chatter, the chatter of the dead. This section moves
smoothly into the last.
Think of "a ringing telephone that runs away when you try to answer it," or of "a memory sinking in dark water" or "a
dream that won't wake up." A poem titled "Running in from the Garden" allows the poet to think of what he'd like to
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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have Left inside him; his answers are worth reading. And the last poem, "Knock," informs us that we "can always write
poems." Even if "[t]hey might still come knocking at your door, having imagined all the wrong symbols in your poem,
but you will have disappeared into the words."
I loved this book. I hope poets everywhere will find it and read it and enjoy it as much as I did. It would be perfect as a
holiday gift, the lightness predominating while the dark is acknowledged.
*
Kelly Cherry is the author of The Life and Death of Poetiy: Poems and Twelve Women in a Country Called America:
Stories
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cherry, Kelly. "Spaceman of Bohemia." Hollins Critic, vol. 54, no. 3, 2017, p. 12+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496086028&it=r&asid=e8fdebe0ba8886aa1527b2110a1b56f4.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496086028

Senior, Jennifer. "Intergalactic Spider Included." New York Times, 9 Mar. 2017, p. C6(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484591876&it=r&asid=1c8f01734ec70a6a0c47d54faf75562c. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Bankhead, Henry. "Kalfar, Jaroslav. Spaceman of Bohemia." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301206&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Brown, Melissa. "Spaceman of Bohemia." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 18+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701838&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Apte, Poornima. "Spaceman of Bohemia." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442500&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "Spaceman of Bohemia." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 170. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195137&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "Kalfar, Jaroslav: SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652420&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Cherry, Kelly. "Spaceman of Bohemia." Hollins Critic, vol. 54, no. 3, 2017, p. 12+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496086028&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2017/03/03/515438970/sanity-is-slowly-lost-in-spaceman-of-bohemia
  Word count: 771

  Sanity Is Slowly Lost In 'Spaceman Of Bohemia'

  March 3, 20177:00 AM ET
  JASON HELLER
  Spaceman of Bohemia
  Spaceman of Bohemia
  by Jaroslav Kalfar

  Hardcover, 276 pages purchase

  Jakub Procházka, a citizen of the Czech Republic in the very near future, loves nothing more than silence and solitude. So, despite his cozy position as a professor of astrophysics and a tranquil domestic life with his wife Lenka, he's oddly relieved to be chosen as the first Czech to travel to space, where the most profound silence and solitude abound. Not that his mission is a calming one: The year is 2018, and a strange comet has left a vast cloud of space dust between Earth and Venus. The night sky has turned from black to perpetually purple. Now this eerie cloud, dubbed Chopra by Indian astronomers, has begun to devour itself. After five failed international space missions to investigate Chopra (including one captained by a chimpanzee) the Czech Republic has stepped up and offered its humble services. Launched from a potato field outside Prague, Jakub's spacecraft, JanHus1, sets out on an eight-month trek to plumb the mystery of Chopra.

  The premise of Spaceman of Bohemia, the debut novel by Czech-American author Jaroslav Kalfar, doesn't skimp on hooks. But there's far more to it than just a quirky, imaginative, sci-fi setup. The story begins with Jakub already in space, rocketing toward Chopra and becoming accustomed to his new hermetic existence. Kalfar's use of science fiction is not rigorous: It's a thing of silliness and mild satire, of corporate sponsors named SuperZub and tubes of astronaut spaghetti. By the same token, Kalfar ventilates what might an otherwise angst-ridden story with bursts of absurdity. Like when a grotesque, alien spider—which, in an unsettling twist, possesses a sensuous human mouth—appears onboard the ship and becomes Jakub's companion, a mix of sidekick, therapist, and existential sounding board. The question of whether it's an actual alien or a figment of Jakub's feverish loneliness is playfully undercut by numerous dreamy flashbacks that reveal a world bordering on magic realism: His rural childhood during the real-life Velvet Revolution—the fall of the Iron Curtain in what was then Czechoslovakia and his tenure as an academic later in life, when he becomes an expert in the hilariously specialized field of cosmic dust.

  The closer Jakub's surreal trek draws him to Chopra and its mysteries, the deeper he probes his own psyche. His ship becomes an echo chamber for his past regrets, sexual escapades, and memories of his parents and grandparents, who embody the clashes of ideology that came to a head during the Velvet Revolution. But his most poignant rumination concerns his wife Lenka, and the way their long-distance love affair has begun to cool and decay once they're no longer able to communicate: "The emptiness of space could not match the despair I felt when her laughter gave way to static silences." The book, however, is far from claustrophobic; Jakub's identity and tribulations are tethered to those of his homeland, and that rich history of political turmoil and cultural upheaval serves as a backdrop. A hero of his people since being chosen for this mission, Jakub feels both proud of and trapped by his status as a national symbol, even as he ponders the Czech Republic's rocky transition from communism to capitalism. The plot's primary mystery unfolds beautifully as well; the secret of Chopra, as wondrous as it is, segues into another, more personal one: Who exactly chose Jakub to go into space—and why?

  Spaceman of Bohemia gets heavy—but the story, like its protagonist, flies along weightlessly. A book like this lives and dies on the strength of its first-person voice, and in that regard, Kalfar triumphs. Jakub may be self-absorbed, but he's also charming, funny, and endearingly sympathetic. The reader is, in essence, cooped up in his spaceship with him, and it speaks to Kalfar's deftness that Jakub is never less than charismatic and engaging, even when wallowing in the least admirable dimensions of his own mind. Spaceman of Bohemia turns the lonely-spaceman cliché on its head; Jakub isn't driven to madness by his tenure in space, exactly, but toward a lucid state of super-sanity, with all the pain and poignancy that comes with it. Granted, Spaceman's case, the line between madness and sanity can be as nebulous as a strange cloud between Venus and Earth.

  Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/dceebe02-152f-11e7-b0c1-37e417ee6c76?mhq5j=e7
  Word count: 1074

  Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
  https://www.ft.com/content/dceebe02-152f-11e7-b0c1-37e417ee6c76?mhq5j=e7

  Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař — personal space

  A Czech astronaut in search of a dust cloud stars in an ironic debut about national identity

  © AFP
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  APRIL 7, 2017 by Ken Kalfus
  Legend maintains that when the 8th-century Princess Libuše founded Prague, she announced, “I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars.” The Czech astronaut at the heart of Jaroslav Kalfař’s ironic, occasionally rickety first novel has been assigned to validate this prophecy. In an age in which countries large and small anxiously assert their greatness, his 2018 space mission is enveloped in all the bombast that typically signifies promises of national grandeur.

  Spaceman of Bohemia gently mocks the Czechs’ ambition to regain their medieval prominence in European commerce, culture and science. Astronaut Jakub Procházka has been sent alone on a four-month journey to recover dust particles from a strange cloud that has settled near the planet Venus, infusing Earth’s night skies with a purple light. While his spacecraft is named the JanHus1, after the medieval Czech ascetic and religious dissident, it’s a corporate-sponsored vehicle for advertising every kind of consumer product. Jakub is supposed to embody “the soul of the republic” on a voyage of discovery. His discount spacesuit, however, smells “faintly of thrift stores and burning coal”.

  Jakub carries more baggage, national and personal, than is easily accommodated aboard the JanHus1. Beyond coming to terms with some painful family history, he’s trying to save his increasingly long-distance relationship with his wife Lenka. As he puts it: “Conducting an Earth/Space marriage through these weekly video feeds felt like watching an infection claim healthy flesh inch by inch while making plans for next summer.”

  Lenka has become resentful of Jakub’s absence and his celebrity as an astronaut. She refuses to be cast as Penelope and assume a secondary role in her own life. She’ll set sail for her own wars, she says. This is something the couple probably should have worked out before lift-off.

  Most absorbingly, the novel probes the Czech Republic’s recent past as well as the life of Jakub’s beloved late father, who was employed by the former communist regime as a secret policeman and interrogator. After the Velvet Revolution and his parents’ untimely deaths abroad, the young Jakub is shamed and shunned. A former political prisoner, intent on extracting revenge, shows up at the door of the home the boy shares with his grandparents. Decades later the adult Jakub hopes his heroism in space will somehow erase the stain on his family’s terrestrial honour. Kalfař, a Czech-born American writer, vividly evokes the landscape, the people and the complicated moral history of his native land.

  Jakub has been selected for the mission ostensibly because he’s an astrophysicist and a specialist on cosmic dust, the microscopic bits of rock, hydrocarbons and ice that float between the stars and planets. He’s long been drawn to all kinds of tiny particles. He pleasantly recalls a sunrise at his grandfather’s house, where “the dust floats around in the thin rays of light, like the first pollen of the summer or star projections on the walls of a planetarium”. He wonders at the unseen physical traces that his dead father may have left in their home and even on his instruments of torture. As an astronaut, Jakub carries his grandfather’s ashes into space. The science in Spaceman of Bohemia is very unreliable, but it’s true that stars rise from clouds of interstellar dust, and after stars die it’s to dust they return. His grandfather will join that dust to form a new celestial object.

  No space fantasy would be complete without an alien. As Jakub meditates on his personal life, the astronaut becomes aware of an “insistent scratching that resonated throughout the ship whenever one of the cameras went offline, skittering away as I approached”. The two space travellers soon come face-to-many-eyed-face. Once he befriends the amiable, mind-reading, spider-like alien, Jakub names him Hanuš, after a medieval Czech astronomer, another tribute to the nation’s bygone glory. The alien calls him “skinny human” and cleans him out of his Nutella. Jakub never reports to Mission Control his flight’s most important discovery.

  ‘Spaceman of Bohemia’ gently mocks the Czechs’ ambition to regain their medieval prominence

  In the first half of the novel, Spaceman of Bohemia seems dimly imagined, especially in its space settings, where the scientific implausibility of the dust cloud, the Czech mission, the lone astronaut and the talking spider lend the story the insubstantiality of a lazy fantasy. The novel brightens somewhat in its second half, when Kalfař untethers Jakub from the JanHus1, setting in motion a brisk sequence of further, more entertaining improbabilities. Yet in these last pages the author strains for meaning while the astronaut seeks to understand his own significance to Czech history. The novel’s language is sometimes awkward and words are misused, as if the book had been launched without editorial Mission Control.

  While calls for national greatness are usually no more than yelps of hollow rhetoric, blind to the realities of human circumstance, a novel’s literary value resides in its unflinching expression of mortal truths. In his growing wisdom, Spaceman Jakub learns that the relentless grinding of history against matter, human individuality against human love and human perversity against human decency eventually leave everything as diffuse and weightless as the dust he’s been rocketed into space to collect.

  Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfař, Sceptre, RRP£12.99/Little, Brown, RRP$26, 277 pages

  Ken Kalfus is author of ‘Coup de Foudre’ (Bloomsbury USA)

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