Author is hemmed in by history

Genocide, history, fame: Jáchym Topol has a lot on his mind. But something else was preoccupying the novelist - perhaps the country's most successful - as he sat down at a Prague 5 café one recent morning.

"They're giving me the prize tomorrow, and I need to buy a dress shirt. Where can you buy a dress shirt around here? What about my haircut?" he asked, only half in jest.

The prize Topol was referring to is the Jaroslav Seifert Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Czech Republic, which the Charter 77 Foundation awarded the writer for his most recent novel, Chladnou zemí, or Cold Land, published earlier this year. Set in the Terezín ghetto and in Belarus, the novel continues Topol's practice of re-examining history through the Surrealist-tinted lens of his imagination.

The subject of Cold Land is Topol's darkest yet: the Belarusian genocide, propagated by the Nazis as part of "Generalplan Ost," the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe which led to the death of approximately 4 million men, women and children, about half the population of Belarus.

"Belarus shocked me. I went there because one of my books was published there, and I learned what many people still do not realize: that the country is an unhappy place where the machinery of mass murder was tested," he said.

But Topol is a novelist, not a historian. Like his previous books, Cold Land puts an imaginative spin on the events it depicts, and this Topolian method of reappropriating history has offended some critics who believe Topol makes light of atrocities. But Cold Land has won the approval of Ivan Klíma and Arnošt Lustig, two prominent Czech writers who lived in Terezín, and of Tomas Kosta, a German publisher who also lived in the ghetto city.

"I don't see myself as a castigator or a declaimer. And I'm not making fun of these events. The black, skewed humor is there because we cannot write about World War II in that affected style which was used in 1955. We have a certain distance now," he said.

Many books have risen to prominence on waves of controversy, and polarizing subject matter usually ensures brisk sales. But Topol does not hesitate to say his latest novel deserves more praise than anything he has written previously.

"To tell you the truth, I really do think this is my best book. I have a feeling with most of my books that I should have done more or done better, but I feel like [Cold Land] is exactly how I wanted it," he said.

In many ways, Topol is a writer obsessed with history. Sestra, published in Czech in 1994 and translated into English as City Sister Silver in 2000, is widely considered Topol's early masterpiece. In it, Topol narrates the events of November 1989, when "time exploded," as he phrased it.

A more recent novel dealing with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kloktat dehet, or Gargling with Tar, was published to wide acclaim in 2005 and translated into English earlier this year. (See book review in The Prague Post, Aug. 12). With the publication of Cold Land, Topol has covered nearly all of the major historical events of 20th-century Central European history, with the exception of World War I.

But Topol never set out to be a historical novelist, even one whose style is strikingly original. Rather, he says, he feels somewhat hemmed in by his nation's history, which is too pervasive to be ignored.

"I would really love to write about people - she loves him, he loves her or not - a major drama. But on every street and in every village in Central Europe lived someone who was sent to a death camp, or someone who sent him there. I cannot write a village story from the 1950s, '60s, '70s or '80s and not have communists or Nazis in it, because that would be unrealistic. This teases me a great deal; it annoys me," he said.

The common wisdom among writers is that too much fame too early can ruin one's talent. Indeed, having won the Czech Republic's top literary prize at the age of 48, Topol has begun to wonder how he can outdo himself. But he also has a profound sense of cathartic accomplishment with Cold Land and its positive reception.

"I have the feeling that [Cold Land] is the end of a journey. I needed to investigate these East European murders, but I don't want to specialize in them. I don't ever want to go to Belarus again," he said.

Where Topol will go next is a question on every reader's mind.

- Filip Šenk contributed to this report.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com