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Current AffairsPrague Writers’ Festival opens 19th year
Sunday evening saw the opening of the Czech Republic’s main annual
literary event, the Prague Writers’ Festival, at the city’s Laterna
Magika theatre. Now in its 19th year, the festival continues its mission of
bringing the crème de la crème of the literary world to Prague, and Czech
writers to the world’s attention as well.
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Czech BooksNeither here nor there: 1980s Prague through the eyes of Marsha Kocábová
The 1980s was the last decade of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
Political oppression at that time was not as fierce as in the beginning of
the totalitarian regime in the 1950s, but still there was no end in sight.
Society was demoralized and constantly bullied by the authorities, people
mostly cared about themselves more than anything else, and bureaucracy
permeated every aspect of life. In short, not a happy time. One of the
very
few Americans living here in those days was Marsha Kocábová, who came to
Prague in 1982. Her book ‘Neither Here nor There’, which has just come
out in Czech, describes life in the Czech capital. More
Czech BooksA new novel by Jáchym Topol and a prize nobody wants to win
Wolves in Poland, Shakespeare in Japan and the pitfalls of literary
translation. These are just three of the many subjects that came up when I
visited to the Bookworld international book fair in Prague last week.
Bookworld is a huge and diverse event, by far the biggest of its kind in
the Czech Republic. It would be impossible to cover everything that was
going on, even during the few hours that I was there, but here at least is
a taste of the event. More
Czech BooksA stroll round the edge of the postmodern city
This week Czech Books met with a relatively new, but highly praised writer
of prose and poetry, Josef Straka. The way in which Straka describes his
experience of modern life, particularly city life, could be considered to
be very postmodern in its fascination with the peripheral and the
fragmentary. Originally from Jablonec nad Nisou in the north he is now
based in Prague, though likes nothing better than to make long walks around
the margins of other European cities, seeking out fragments of real life,
what he calls ‘small miracles’, and living a life of ‘voluntary
simplicity’ in a complex global world. I met with him in the hidden-away,
and given his passion for long walks, aptly named Café Marathon.
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Czech BooksThe Bookworld international book fair rises from the ashes
Less than six months ago, a disastrous fire reduced an entire wing of
Prague’s historic Industrial Exhibition Hall to a pile of twisted metal
and masonry, but the building has made a remarkable recovery. In a few
days’ time it will be housing the Czech Republic’s biggest annual book
fair, Svět knihy or Bookworld, which will be taking place for the
fifteenth year running, and seems remarkably unscathed either by the fire
or the rages of the world economic crisis. To find out more, I managed to
steal a few minutes with the busy and energetic Bookworld director, Dana
Kalinová, and amid the organized chaos of her Prague office, she told me
about the event’s priorities.
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Czech BooksGrave Matters
This week Czech Books is looking at the novel Mrchopěvci, or Gravelarks,
the first novel by the hugely accomplished polymath and polyglot author
Václav Pinkava, who wrote - amongst others - under the pen name Jan
Křesadlo. Pinkava was born in Prague in 1926 and emigrated to Britain in
1969 where he worked as a clinical psychologist in Colchester. Gravelarks
was his first novel, written during his early retirement; it was hailed by
author Josef Škvorecký as "one of the most original, shocking,
truthful works of contemporary Czech fiction" and was awarded the
prestigious Egon Hostovský prize. I met, in a rather lively café, with
Michael Tate, who is in Prague researching into the works of Pinkava and
other writers of his generation, and first asked him to say something about
the whole creative work of a man who truly deserves the often over-used
epithet 'Renaissance Man'.
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One on OneAuthor Peter Demetz: you could be of any nationality and still feel Czechoslovak
Pre-war Prague with its multi-national and multi-cultural environment has
inspired many scholars and writers who explore the life of Czechs, Germans
and Jews in the city of a hundred spires before it was swept away by the
two totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Our guest in this edition of
One on One is Professor Peter Demetz, the author of Prague in Black and
Gold, Stage: Prague, and other works. Mr Demetz was born in Prague in the
1920s to a German and Jewish family but left the country after the
communist takeover of 1948 and later became a professor of German studies
and literature at Yale University in the United States. Although Peter
Demetz was born in Prague, he actually grew up in Brno, so I first asked
him about the differences between the two cities.
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Current AffairsWorld-renowned Czech author Kundera turns 80
Perhaps the best known Czech author in the world today, Milan Kundera,
turns 80 this Wednesday. The reclusive author of works such as ‘The
Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and ‘The Joke’ is celebrating his
birthday in his adoptive France, where he has just released a new volume of
essays.
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One on OneRuth Ellen Gruber, an expert on Jewish heritage and Europe’s country music
For four decades, the countries trapped behind the Iron Curtain attracted
only a few travellers from the West. Our guest in this week’s edition of
One on One is the American writer, scholar and photographer Ruth Ellen
Gruber, whose reporting career brought her to the communist block in the
1970s. She spent time in Belgrade and Warsaw, among other places, and
after
the fall of communism, she stayed in Europe and became a leading scholar
on
eastern European Jewish heritage – and the region’s country music. More
Czech BooksJaroslav Rudiš: craving for noise and silence
If you live in Prague, it is quite likely that you will have encountered
Jaroslav Rudiš as a rock musician, performing with gloom and late ‘70s
angst with Jaromír 99 and the Bombers or his own band U-Bahn. Novelist,
playwright, screenplay writer and musician, Rudiš is a man of many
talents, and in recent years he has acquired something of a cult following
on the Czech literary scene. If you want to know a bit more about Jaroslav,
a good place to start is with his Facebook or MySpace profile: there
you’ll find out that he’s straight, going on 37, he likes Milan
Kundera, Walter Benjamin, The Cure, his favourite make of car is Saab, and
so on and so on. But how much does this tell us about what Jaroslav Rudiš
is really like? When I met him to talk about his recent work, I began by
asking him if there was anything important he had left out in his Facebook
and MySpace profiles.
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