Czech Books Jaroslav Rudis and the discreet charms of the Berlin U-Bahn
Welcome again to Czech Books. Now every little boy feels a frisson of excitement as he watches a train thundering past or disappearing into a tunnel, but by the time we hit 30 most of us have become pretty blasé about such things. Not so the Czech writer Jaroslav Rudis. His writing reflects a positive obsession with trains, and even the famously unsuccessful punk band he plays in has the unlikely name of U-Bahn, named after the Berlin underground railway. In fact the Berlin U-Bahn was the hero of Jaroslav Rudis's highly successful first novel, "Nebe pod Berlinem" - "The Heavens under Berlin" - that was published last year. The book's rather quirky title is an inversion of the film director Wim Wender's Berlin classic, "Der Himmel über Berlin", known in English as "Wings of Desire", and the novel offers an eccentric, very Czech perspective on life in the German capital. Trains figure almost as prominently in Jaroslav Rudis's second novel "Bily potok" - "The White Stream" - that came out last week. But his writing is about a great deal more than rolling stock and bogies, as Pavla Jonssonova found out when she invited him to the studio. She asked Jaroslav what it was that drew him as a Czech writer to Berlin.
Jaroslav Rudis
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