eleanorfranzen 's review for:

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař

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This is both a science fiction novel—in which the first Czech astronaut is dispatched to investigate a mysterious purple cloud of space dust and meets a telepathic alien arachnoid fond of Nutella, whom he dubs Hanuš—and a political novel, exploring the ripples of 20th-century Czech history. Jakub Procházka, the astronaut, is the son of a Communist torturer. This legacy haunts Jakub from childhood onwards, as one of his father’s former victims, now a member of the ruling political class in capitalist Prague, uses his newfound power to ensure that the Procházkas are first shunned and then evicted from their home, which he then buys and leaves empty. Kalfař deals with the question of what heroism means, the way a public hero must surrender their life to a cause, and the various institutions that ask people to surrender their lives in this way, including, of course, the Church, the Communist regime, and the new capitalist order. The fifteenth-century religious martyr Jan Hus is a major touchstone: Jakub’s ship is named for him. I’m not sure how well this fusion works. The space-set sections have a different tone, much goofier and in some senses more bittersweet, although they’re definitely legible as nods to the Czech surrealist tradition of Kafka, Vítězslav Nezval, and others. It’s good to read genre fiction that doesn’t reproduce Anglo-American cultural assumptions, though; this was really enjoyable. (Hanuš is absolutely great.) Source: passed on by Rebecca—thank you!