http://www.radio.cz/en/current/books Czech books - a fortnightly feauture looking at Czech writing today en Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:01:00 +0100 Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:01:00 +0100 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Radio Prague CMS 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Radio Broadcasting cr@radio.cz (Cesky Rozhlas) webmaster@radio.cz (CRo Webmaster) http://www.radio.cz/en/article/125383 Literature sometimes makes for some unusual connections. What, for example, could Franz Kafka possibly have in common with the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland? To find the answer we start at the busy British Council office, just a couple of streets down from Czech Radio’s headquarters. Just after World War II, the British Council here was headed by Edwin Muir, who was born in 1887 in Orkney and grew up on the tiny island of Wyre. He is one of Scotland’s best known 20th century poets, but it is also quite possible that you will have come across his name and that of his wife Willa on the inside cover of one of Franz Kafka’s novels or stories. They translated many of his works and did much to establish his reputation in the English-speaking world. What is less well-known about Edwin Muir is the time he spent in Prague, first in the 1920s and then again between 1946 and 1949. Clarice Cloutier, who teaches literature at two Prague universities, has written about Edwin Muir’s link to this city – a link which, she tells me, is a good deal more than skin deep: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:b717c570-f485-59f4-ae18-03850a9e2174 http://www.radio.cz/en/article/124984 When John Millington Synge’s masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World was first performed in Dublin in 1907, there were riots in protest. The black comedy with its tale of attempted patricide was seen as going beyond the limits of decency, and was even accused of putting the Irish nation into disrepute. Set in an isolated and poor rural community, Synge’s play relishes the wealth of western Irish dialect, and today is universally acknowledged as one of the classics of Irish drama. But what does that have to do with the Czech Republic? In this programme, we tell the fascinating story of how The Playboy of the Western World also came to be a Czech classic. Sun, 14 Feb 2010 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:08995ba5-06a7-55c3-a524-648ef32510a2 http://www.radio.cz/en/article/124478 Since the fall of communism, Petr Pithart has been a central Czech political figure. As one of the first people to sign the human rights manifesto, Charter 77, he spent the last years of the communist regime as a political dissident. But as the regime collapsed in November 1989, he shot to prominence – firstly in Civic Forum, which brought together those fighting for an end to one-party rule, and then as the first post-communist prime minister of the Czech part of the Czechoslovak federation. Later he went on to be chairman of the Czech Senate and today he serves as the Senate’s deputy chairman. Senator Pithart has just published a book with the simple title “1989”, in which he reflects on the events and the legacy of the time. Surprisingly the book is one of the first studies to be written by a prominent actor in the Velvet Revolution. The book is striking for the openness with which it discusses the mistakes that were made, mistakes that in Pithart’s view, hastened the split of Czechoslovakia and sowed the seeds for many of the political problems in the Czech Republic today. When I went to see Senator Pithart, he began by telling me that he was drawn into the fray of politics more or less by chance. Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:218eab71-f4b0-53fd-9c7d-ec94032f0b89 http://www.radio.cz/en/article/124032 The novel “Peníze od Hitlera” (Money from Hitler), is one of the best Czech books I’ve read for a long time, and luckily for English-speaking readers, it has just been published in an excellent English translation by Women’s Press in Toronto. When it first appeared in Czech over three years ago, Money from Hitler caused quite a stir; it won the prestigious Magnesia Litera award, but Czech critics remained divided. Perhaps this is no surprise. The author, 41-year-old Radka Denemarková, chose one of the most sensitive and painful episodes of modern Czech history as her starting point, a subject that for many remains taboo to this day. Her book goes back to the days just after the end of World War Two, when tens of thousands of Czechoslovakia’s German-speakers were being rounded up and expelled from the country. It is no secret that the expulsions, especially in these early stages, were often accompanied by acts of violence, sometimes quite indiscriminate. In her novel Radka Denemarková literally pulls these events out from the topsoil of the recent past, as we see in the vivid opening chapter, when a small boy digs up a rather unusual object in his parents’ orchard with his little green spade. Here is an extract: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:1a1f1465-51a2-542a-9ebc-7f9da5ea77f6 http://www.radio.cz/en/article/123307 Hello and welcome to Czech Books. On 1st December a great new source of information about Czech literature was launched – an English language version of the Czech Literature Portal. I went to visit Viktor Debnár of the Arts Institute in Prague, which is responsible for the project, and Jaroslav Balvín, the portal’s editor, to find out more. Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:f69751e7-3ed4-55aa-8a4f-29e3ca839637 http://www.radio.cz/en/article/122847 Barbara Day works for a non-profit organization called The Prague Society, promoting international links in business, politics and academia. Twenty-five years ago, Barbara was doing a job that, at least on the surface, seems very similar. Then based in London, she was coordinating visits by Western academics to Czechoslovakia. But times could hardly have been more different. In those days, such initiatives were seen by the communist regime as a subversive activity. Constantly harangued by Czechoslovakia’s secret police – the StB – visiting lecturers, including some of the world’s most renowned philosophers, would meet secretly at private flats. In what came to be known as the “underground seminars” they would address small groups made up of students, dissidents and anyone else brave enough to turn up, and lectures covered subjects as varied as the philosophy of Plato and the music of Mahler. Barbara Day’s book, The Velvet Philosophers, recounts the details of how the seminars worked. When I met Barbara, she began by telling me how the seminars started: It was in the years just after the 1968 Soviet invasion, when many of Czechoslovakia’s top academics were thrown out of their jobs, and even their children found themselves in trouble. Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:a8f8902c-8f2b-5981-ad40-0aa2692c01c7 http://www.radio.cz/en/article/122392 Hello and welcome to Czech Books. This week we're discussing the novel The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer, one of this year's nominations for the prestigious Man Booker prize. The novel, which has already been translated into Czech and had a very positive local reception, is inspired by the functionalist masterpiece, the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, and covers over half a century of Czech history, focusing mainly on the fates of the Jewish industrialist Victor Landauer and his wife Liesel. I met with a professor of English Literature at Charles University's Education Faculty, Dr. Anna Grmelová, to discuss in particular the book's depiction of the rich and diverse cultural life of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:7e7fcdcc-e408-5eff-ad01-1d77208fff63 http://www.radio.cz/en/article/121943 The 78-year-old novelist, Ivan Klíma, is one of the best known and most widely translated of all Czech writers, with novels like “Love and Garbage”, “Judge on Trial” or “No Saints or Angels” acclaimed worldwide. Nearly all Klíma’s work focuses on human relationships, in particular between men and women, but at the same time he offers far broader insights into modern Czech society. In a recent interview for Radio Prague Klíma spoke about his latest book “My Crazy Century” in which he looks back at the first half of his life including his years in a Nazi concentration camp and his later flirtation with communism. But when I went to see Ivan Klíma last week at his house in a leafy suburb of Prague, it was to talk about the more recent past. I was interested in how he perceives the years since the fall of communism. The Velvet Revolution came suddenly, but did it take Ivan Klíma by surprise? Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:00:59 +0100 urn:uuid:c256da95-3005-5359-8dea-85a5d1a5d7fa http://www.radio.cz/en/article/121511 A couple of years ago in this programme we spoke to the young Czech novelist Petra Hůlová about her epic novel of life in contemporary Mongolia, “Paměť mojí babičce“ – which translates literally as “Memory for My Grandmother”. The book has just been published to considerable acclaim in English translation by Northwestern University Press under the title “All This Belongs to Me”. Since writing it back in 2002, Petra has been far from idle, publishing no less than four further novels that take us from inside the mind of an ageing prostitute to the steppes of distant Siberia. At the moment she is putting the finishing touches on another novel, this time with a theme closer to home, spanning the years just before and after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. With the twentieth anniversary of the revolution just days away, I joined Petra Hůlová in the Café Louvre, just above the spot in Prague’s Národní třída (National Street), where it all began on November 17 1989. It was here that the police violently suppressed a huge student demonstration, causing a wave of protest across the country that eventually brought down the regime. So I began by asking Petra about her memories of that time as a ten-year-old child. Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:59:59 +0200 urn:uuid:5b52c526-44d3-509e-be75-6afa3e9d73cb http://www.radio.cz/en/article/121038 This week Czech Books met with the writer, feminist and environmental campaigner Eva Hauserová to talk about her novel Cvokyně - or Madwoman - before she left Prague to present it in libraries throughout the country as part of national Book Week. Madwoman tells the story of a time-travelling scientist and uses the science fiction genre to make darkly comic and sardonic comments on Czech society of the 1980s. A newly revised edition of the book was published last month and I first asked Eva to outline its plot. Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:59:59 +0200 urn:uuid:078ec047-7f3a-5a37-9880-40454a96beca