Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

Overview

"A frenetically imaginative first effort, booming with vitality and originality . . . Kalfar's voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks."-Jennifer Senior, New York Times

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's 2017 First Novel Prize
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Best New Fiction — Wall Street Journal


An intergalactic odyssey of love, ambition, and self-discovery

Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Procházka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown. But in so doing, he leaves behind his devoted wife, Lenka, whose love, he realizes too late, he has sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions.

Alone in Deep Space, Jakub discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion. Over philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death, and the deliciousness of bacon, the pair form an intense and emotional bond. Will it be enough to see Jakub through a clash with secret Russian rivals and return him safely to Earth for a second chance with Lenka?

Rich with warmth and suspense and surprise, Spaceman of Bohemia is an exuberant delight from start to finish. Very seldom has a novel this profound taken readers on a journey of such boundless entertainment and sheer fun.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316273435
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

The path to becoming a lifelong reader of science fiction that wends through youth and adolescence is a well-charted one. Fans of my generation, after devouring all the Dr. Seuss books they could glom onto, often moved on to franchise fiction like Tom Swift or the justly forgotten Rick Brant adventures. Then they might discover quirky beginner series like the Mushroom Planet books of Eleanor Cameron, or A Wrinkle in Time, before segueing into the hardcore yet invitingly transparent genre works by Andre Norton, or the Scribner juveniles of Heinlein. The gateway to reading mature works of science fiction was then thrown wide open, and we were hooked for life and seldom abandoned science fiction as we entered our adult years. Today, the incredible wealth of young adult fantastika has broadened this introductory avenue even more, luring curious teens into the habit of reading SF by any of a hundred franchises or solo works — if they have not already been hooked by the cinema of the fantastic.

But what about adults who never developed a taste for science fiction when they were young? Sometimes the marketplace itself produces a book that, for whatever obvious or enigmatic reason, seems to leap out and snare novice readers. Perhaps the most recent such title is Andy Weir's The Martian. If we look at its success, we can identify several factors that attract the newbie. A heroic yet Everyman character with whom it is easy to empathize. A clear-cut quest or problem to be solved. A story that doesn't require familiarity with other SF stories or tropes. A small degree of pleasant estrangement from the mundane, an exoticism that is not utterly weird or off-putting. An ultimate hard-won victory, instead of a tragic ending. A depiction of science that renders it essential to human progress and survival, a force for good rather than evil. Familiar interpersonal relations, involving primal emotions such as love and fear.

If we cast about for classics that meet these parameters at least in part — books that could entice the non-reader of SF — we find that the list is short. I would first point to such perennials as Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. H.nbsp;G. Wells's The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The War of the Worlds. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land might still allure. Certainly the success of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline paralleled that of The Martian, both coincidentally released in the same year. Humor is perhaps the one vital ingredient lacking in The Martian (a deficit that Matt Damon's droll line readings helped redress in the film version) and the popularity of Douglas Adams's books among all kinds of readers attests to that powerful factor.

An SF novel does not necessarily have to be "upbeat" to win over a general audience, as testified to by the canonical role of Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Jack Finney's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. A book such as Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside, with its meticulous mimetic depiction of a telepath losing his powers in a contemporary milieu, could easily hook the typical New Yorker subscriber.

Sometimes authors deliberately try to create an accessible novel that mimics the "gateway drugs" of their own youth. John Varley's Thunder and Lightning series, which began with Red Thunder, is perhaps the most successful recent example. Steven Gould's Jumper series is another, and so is the Everness series by Ian MacDonald, launched with Planesrunner. Less well known are a couple of books by William Barton: The Transmigration of Souls and When We Were Real. Richard Morgan's debut novel, Altered Carbon, took the sometimes arcane tropes of cyberpunk and blended them with enough noir to facilitate engagement by newcomers. Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy about the colonization of Mars lured many new fans by its meticulous realism.

Perhaps the newest outstanding success in this vein is the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, which has spun off a well- regarded television show. If we were in this essay considering High Fantasy, then George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones would be an obvious analogue to Expanse: an undiluted genre property that nonetheless reaches beyond the fanboys.

And then, of course, there are sui generis brand-name writers such as Stephen King, who seems magically able to make vast crowds of civilians accept far-out tales of time-travel and apocalypse without flinching.

Although successes like The Martian come infrequently and cannot be programmed or predicted, we might be seeing a similar case with the debut novel from Jaroslav Kalfař, Spaceman of Bohemia. But whereas The Martian was all engaging "competency porn" and featured easily apprehended surfaces, Kalfař's novel is resoundingly about failure and the interior life. In fact, it is a pedigreed descendant of the landmark novels of Barry Malzberg, who at the height of his career represented the deliberate, postmodern dismantling of the Golden Age verities about space travel. In books such as Galaxies, Beyond Apollo, and The Falling Astronauts (all of which have been recently reissued by Anti- Oedipus Press in handsome new editions), Malzberg portrayed astronauts as neurotic basket cases, subject to existential doubts, sexual tensions, bureaucratic headaches, and bouts of hallucinatory mysticism, with space travel itself being seen as an unnatural violation of cosmic and ethical proprieties. Kalfař is fully onboard with this assessment.

The book opens in 2018, with the launch of the Czech space shuttle JanHus1. Instantly, given the absolute historical insignificance of any actual Czech space program, we feel we are in the slightly absurdist territory of Leonard Wibberley's books about the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, notably The Mouse on the Moon. This mismatch between overweening ambition and humbling reality will continue to flavor the tale.

Onboard the craft is a single astronaut, Jakub Procházka, an expert in cosmic space debris. His mission, funded by several corporate sponsors, is to investigate a mysterious and perhaps threatening cometary dust cloud, newly materialized out around Venus. (The cloud, discovered by India, was named Chopra — a dig perhaps at a certain popular New Age icon?) No other nation has volunteered, and so it's up to the Czechs. Four months outward bound, four months back. Surely, with the support of his loyal ground crew and daily audiovisual chats with his wife, Lenka, as well as some delicious comestibles such as Nutella and Tatranky candy bars, Jakub can perform his task satisfactorily. And he might well have succeeded, despite some minor emotional storms, had not an alien materialized inexplicably inside his ship.

The smell was distinct — a combination of stale bread, old newspapers in a basement, a hint of sulfur. The eight hairy legs shot out of the thick barrel of its body like tent poles. Each had three joints the size of a medicine ball, at which the legs bent to the lack of gravity. Thin gray for covered its torso and legs, sprouting chaotically, like alfalfa. It had many eyes, too many to count, red-veined, with irises as black as Space itself. Beneath the eyes rested a set of thick human lips, startlingly red, lipstick red, and as the lips parted, the creature revealed a set of yellowing teeth which resembled those of an average human smoker. As it fixed its eyes on me, I tried to count them.

This creature, which will eventually allow Jakub to call it "Hanuš," wishes to interrogate Jakub and learn all about "humanry," without offering much in return. It consumes all of the larder's Nutella, too. At first believing himself to be hallucinating, Jakub eventually accepts the creature. With his Earth-resident wife having ditched him, he needs the company. And then, as the craft impacts the dust cloud: transcendence, extinction, rebirth, in a most unexpected manner. The latter half of the novel finds Jakub trying to reassemble his life and dreams, post-Chopra, under the most unexpected conditions.

Kalfař wisely and deftly provides a second track to Jakub's narrative: his poignant familial back-story. Jakub's father was a state-sponsored torturer under the Communist regime. Upon the death of Jakub's parents, the young boy goes to live with his grandparents. One day, a stranger arrives, a victim of the interrogations conducted by Jakub's father, and now, rich and free in the new Czech Republic, seeks revenge. And so, interspersed with Jakub's spaceflight, in long episodes richly evocative of a vanished past, we see Jakub's sociopolitical path in his changing nation, as well as his early romance with Lenka. All this history will eventually blend with the outer space experiences to produce deep insights about Jakub's destiny and that of his country.

Kalfař's prose, Jakub's first-person voice, is equal to the task of explicating such weighty fates. Alternately droll, sardonic, weary, gravitas-laden, melancholic, tender, and outraged, Jakub conveys the full dynamic range of the emotional tempests he must survive on this odyssey of self-discovery.

My chest felt hollow. It was a strange sensation, the opposite of anxiety or fear, which to me was always heavy, like chugging asphalt. Now I was a cadaver in waiting. With death so near, the body looks forward to its eternal rest without the pesky soul. So simple, this body. Pulsing and secreting and creaking along, one beat, two beats, filling up one hour after another. The body is the worker and the soul the oppressor. Free the proles, I could hear my father saying. I almost cackled.

Spaceman of Bohemia is not your standard Anglo- American science fiction: In its allegories about geopolitical power trips, it hews more closely to the work of the Strugatsky brothers. In its cognitive derangements and depictions of ontological levels of reality, it stands as a cousin to the work of Stanislaw Lem. The work of Gary Shteyngart — like Kalfař, a writer with a foot in both is his native country and his adopted one — might also come to mind.

Jakub and Hanuš approach the interface of Chopra with the strains of the opera Rusalka playing over the ship's speakers, evoking similar classical-music-tinged interplanetary trajectories in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then they experience its majesty much as 2001's Bowman does the Monolith's:

I passed through the knot of time like sand slipping away inside an hourglass, grain by grain, atom by atom.

Time was not a line, but an awareness. I was no longer a body, but a series of pieces whistling as they bonded. I felt every cell within me. I could count them, name them, kill them, and resurrect them. Within the core, I was a tower made of fossil fragments. I could be disassembled and reassembled. If only someone knew the correct pressure point, I would turn into a pile of elements running off to find another bond, like seasonal farmhands journeying from East to West.

This is what elements do. They leap into darkness until some-thing else catches hold of them. Energy has no consciousness. Force plots no schemes. Things crash into one another, form alliances until physics rips them apart and sends them in opposite directions.

Such bravura metaphysical insights, matched with Realpolitik drama, might very well propel Spaceman of Bohemia into the realm traversed by The Martian and other tales for novice travelers and seasoned astronauts alike.

Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul Di Filippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award — all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Reviewer: Paul Di Filippo

The Barnes & Noble Review

…for all the strangeness of outer space, it is the writing about [Jakub's] home village, the place to which he longs to return and perhaps never can, that beats strongest in this wry, melancholy book.

The New York Times Book Review - Hari Kunzru

…frenetically imaginative…booming with vitality and originality…Kalfar's voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks. He has a great snout for the absurd…Kalfar has an exhilarating flair for imagery…He writes boisterously and mordantly, like a philosophy grad student who's had one too many vodka tonics at the faculty Christmas wingding.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

01/30/2017
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 JanHus1, 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.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/01/2017
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 Procházka 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

Library Journal

2016-12-06
Blend Bradbury and Lem with Saint-Exupéry and perhaps a little Kafka, and you get this talky, pleasing first novel by Czech immigrant writer Kalfar. Jakub Procházka—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.

Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews "10 of Our Favorite Debuts"
The Verge "23 science fiction and fantasy novels to read this March"

PRAISE FOR SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA:

"Kalfar has much larger aims with Spaceman of Bohemia than to write a spry, madcap work of speculative fiction . . . He has such a lively mind and so many ideas to explore . . . Kalfar has an exhilarating flair for imagery. He writes boisterously and mordantly . . . His voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks . . . A frenetically imaginative first effort, booming with vitality and originality."
—Jennifer Senior, New York Times


"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."—Jason Heller, NPR

"In Jaroslav Kalfar's zany first novel . . . the spaceman, the alien, and all the rest of the book's extravagant conceptual furniture are merely metaphors for the human-scale issues that are its real concerns, in particular the collapse of Jakub's marriage to Lenka. That's not to say Kalfar hasn't done his research. There are lovingly detailed passages on the minutiae of life in zero gravity, but all the whizzy space business is harnessed to the basic question of what it means to leave and whether it's possible to come back. The alien acts as a Proustian trigger for Jakub's memories . . . But for all the strangeness of outer space, it is the writing about his home village, the place to which he longs to return and perhaps never can, that beats strongest in this wry, melancholy book."—Hari Kunzru, New York Times Book Review


The author skillfully splices a barbed picture of the Czech Republic between Jakub's misadventures in the cosmos. "These include floating free inside the dust cloud and hitching a ride on a clandestine Russian space shuttle. The book suggests that every national hero has a dark side, though you may have to leave Earth to see it."—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "Best New Fiction"


"Outer space, inner turmoil, fierce ambition and the hunger for love - all seem to boldly go where no novelist has gone before in Jaroslav Kalfar's audaciously moving debut, Spaceman of Bohemia...Eloquent, heart-stunning and rich in awe-inspiring prose, Spaceman of Bohemia flirts with how we leave our mark on history. But its real mission is to unravel what makes us human - and that, according to this wise, rapturous and original novel, is a connection to others."—Caroline Leavitt, San Francisco Chronicle


"Spaceman of Bohemia represents the fiery, funny launch of an exciting new voice. Jaroslav Kalfar, like a good literary astronaut, finds levity in gravity, and vice versa."—Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask


"Spaceman of Bohemia should win many fans. With its interplanetary shenanigans and lessons in Czech history, this zany satirical debut is bursting at the seams."—Tibor Fischer, Guardian UK

"A supercharged, voice-driven romp."
—Meredith Turits, Extra Crispy

"Blend Bradbury and Lem with Saint-Exupéry and perhaps a little Kafka, and you get this talky, pleasing first novel by Czech immigrant writer Kalfar....a book built on sly, decidedly contrarian humor. 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."
—Kirkus Reviews


"Spaceman of Bohemia is an out-of-this-world look at all our beautiful smallnesses, from the cells of our biology to the bacterial minutiae of one broken heart. The roar of revolution and governmental injustice is cast against the depths of our emotions and the bottomless, grateful silence of the stars. Jaroslav Kalfar has spun an unforgettable tale, a poignant interplanetary work that collapses the distance between us with the beauty of its language and the unstoppable wonder of this universe he's created."
—Samantha Hunt, author of Mr. Splitfoot


"Spaceman of Bohemia is the best, most enjoyably heartbreaking, most fun book you'll read this year. On the surface, you'll see affinities with Gary Shteyngart, with The Martian, with Kelly Link. But Jaroslav Kalfar's voice is entirely his own. I beg you: take this strange, hilarious, profound, life-affirming trip into literary outer space."—Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award winner for Half a Life


"Spaceman of Bohemia is a wise and elegant work composed of its own unique ethereal grace-a hauntingly beautiful story of solitude, hope, family, and love that transcends, uplifts, carries the reader away."—Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears


"Spaceman of Bohemia is unforgettable: a work of breathtaking scope and heart, and a reflection of humanity that's raw and strange and profound and true."—Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction


"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."—Library Journal (starred review)


"Kalfar's writing has the same hyperactivity, and fidgety contempt for generic boundaries, as that of the young Safran Foer.... Part space opera, part folk tale, his novel is also a love song to the city of Prague.... Funny, humane and oddly down-to-earth in ways that its scenario cannot possibly convey."
—Claire Armitstead, Guardian UK

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