Spaceman of Bohemia

Written by Jaroslav Kalfar

Narrated by Jot Davies

The first Czech astronaunt navigates the perilf of deep space in this 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.

"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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781478938750

Reviews for Spaceman of Bohemia

[gllyons-120926 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book could have had five stars but honestly the second half rates as only about 2 stars. The first half of the book is an unusual Science fiction book filled with interesting ideas and ruminations on life and meaning. The second half is like the close of a so so thriller.

[big_bang_gorilla · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This splenetic novel comes billed as a thought-provoking, whimsical sky-fy romp, which characeristics are difficult to notice. In point of fact, alternate chapters carry out this theme, but the alternate chapters, which are much longer, have the eponymous protagonist reminiscing about the indignities visited upon his family after the Velvet Revolution to enact revenge because his father was a Communist functionary. Dreary and depressing, these are mostly uninteresting. As for the sky-fy plot, it finds the protagonist heading on a Venutian mission with his only company a space creature who seems benign but also keeps his distance and seems as though he might have something up his octopod sleeves. This is somewhat more interesting, but this plot is hamstrung by the unsympathetic protagonist moaning alternatively about his wife and her annoying personality and that she has left him. I didn't blame her a bit, and followed suit after about a week of wasted time.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There is so much in this unique book. It's Irreverent, insightful and wants to connect with you and there's a good chance it will - even if you don't come from a country subjugated for decades by Russians, although you might need to read about their history to get the context. It's about people defined within humanity, generations, countries, relationships and as individuals. It's definitely not about space travel.

[ken5me5old5mate · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a quirky satisfying book that was. It starts at the beginning works through to the middle then runs on until the end which was not quite what you expected but good enough to carry all that weight and distance. With lots of good old fashioned down home sentiment and enough modern angst to balance each other out.

Definitely not a western book and definitely has that "otherness" about it. A very readable book, well structured, paced and charactered. A nice story, an enriching story with a space escape that will boggle your mind but not unsettle it.

Towards the end I wasn't sure if it was me or the main character that was a bit crazy, it has that kind of emotional osmosis to it.

Certainly not a heavy or hard read but not light enough to read on a plane either.

[paul_samael-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Underwhelmed by this. I found the early sections about what happens to the main character as young boy after the fall of Communism quite compelling (he has to deal with the fallout from his father having been a high ranking official). But the sci-fi element - which sadly, takes up most of the book - just didn't work for me. As other reviewers have pointed out, the author doesn't really take the sci fi element very seriously - which in principle, I don't have a problem with. I like sci fi but I freely acknowledge that there is plenty there to mock or to make use of in a slightly surreal/satirical way. In that respect, the rest of the book reminded me a bit of some of Kurt Vonnegut's work. But after a while I just stopped caring what happened to the main character - and maybe I am missing something, but there wasn't enough going on in terms of ideas or plot to keep my interest from flagging (it was a real struggle to finish and I confess to skimming much of the last third of the book).

[hotcha-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this novel very strange, but I enjoyed it and I can't imagine me racing toward out space at speeds that boggles my mind! I liked the orphaned boy that is Jakub Prochazka who became a man and the first to shoot through space to become his countries first man to travel in space. T as he is stuck in space and meets his imagine little friend he novel is very thought provoking.

[autumnturner76 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Meh. I 'liked' it, but eh. I've read better.

[iansales_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If there’s one thing I hate it’s books which feature space exploration where the author can’t be arsed to get the details right. There is a vast amount of documentation out there, in books and on the internet, on the subject. How fucking difficult is it to get it right? It is, for example, “space” and not “Space”. FFS. A spacecraft shot into space on top of a rocket is not necessarily a “space shuttle” and, in fact, especially not if it’s not reusable. And if a comet enters the Milky Way eighteen months ago, then it actually entered it 29,998.5 years ago as the Sun is 30,000 light-years from the edge of the galaxy. And to reach Earth in 18 months, that comet would have to be travelling at 2.3 light years an hour, or 13,521,700,000,000 mph. It’s not fucking rocket science. Well, you know what I mean. In fact, the novel drops clangers throughout its space-set narrative: describing vacuum as tightening around the narrator “like bathwater”, confusing vacuum and zero gravity, seeming to think spacesuits only use pure oxygen on EVA and then to prevent decompression sickness… Fortunately, the novel’s other narrative is far better. Jakub Procházka has been selected as the first Czech astronaut. The aforementioned comet has left a cloud, named Chopra, “between Earth and Venus” – well no, between the orbits of Earth and Venus, since the distance between the two planets changes as they orbit the Sun. Anyway, the Czechs have decided to send the first crewed spacecraft to Chopra. Procházka is an astrophysicist and the person chosen for the mission – it seems stupid to send one person, especially given the size of the spacecraft, JanHus1, as it is described. En route an alien appears in the spacecraft and tells Procházka it wishes to study “humanry”. It’s not certain whether the alien is real or an hallucination, but given that so much of the space-set narrative is complete bollocks I’m inclined to go for hallucination. (At one point, Procházka sees a frozen Laika float past – which would be difficult as Sputnik 2 disintegrated on re-entry in 1958, five months after Laika’s death.) Interwoven with the JanHus1 mission are chapters on Procházka’s childhood and life and marriage. The son of a secret policeman, who died shortly after the Velvet Revolution, he and his grandparents, who raised him, were shunned by their neighbours. They moved to Prague, Procházka went to university, and became a world expert on cosmic dust – hence his selection for the mission to the cloud. These chapters are interesting and, I assume, much better researched than the other narrative. However, they do make you wonder what the point of Spaceman of Bohemia is. Why not write a novel about growing up in post-Revolution Czechia? Why all the guff about the cloud and the alien and the space mission? Which ends with Procházka being implausibly rescued by a space shuttle from a secret decades-long Russian space programme. Which he causes to crash on re-entry but he manages to survive… before returning home incognito to exorcise some ghosts from his past, which, er, had bugger-all to do with the space mission. The earth-bound narrative is good, a novel in its own right. The space mission is complete bollocks – badly-researched, pointless and dull. If it had not been for that – and given it’s so badly done, how the hell did the book make the shortlist for a science fiction award? – Spaceman of Bohemia would be a bloody good book.

[gwendydd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book seems to capture the essence of what it is like to live in a post-Soviet nation and grapple with Soviet history.

In the near future, a strange dust cloud enters the solar system, and the world is curious about what it is. The government of the Czech Republic sees this as an opportunity to play a role on the world stage, so they send a single man in a spacecraft to study the dust. The narrator, Jakub, dwells on his past during his journey. An alien joins him on his spaceship, although it is never clear if the alien is real or a figment of his unraveling mind. Meanwhile, Jakub dwells on his recent past (his relationship with his wife) and his more distant past, including his father who was a Soviet collaborator and a man who his father had tortured who came into power after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On one hand, there is a Kafkaesque quality to Jakub's life: sh*t happens and there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. On the other hand, his life is also one vast interconnected conspiracy of fatal coincidences. This seems typical of some other Soviet and post-Soviet literature I have read: there is a quest to find meaning in the utter arbitrariness of life in totalitarian regimes, and a hope that the great Soviet vision will come to be. Add to that, in this book, the insecurities of being a part of a small nation battling its own insignificance.

I listened to the audiobook, and found it engaging.

[jackdeighton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a brilliant debut novel but an odd reading experience, like Science Fiction as if written by Milan Kundera. Some of its tonal quality is, perhaps more understandably, also reminiscent of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris.

The set-up is that a comet has entered the Milky Way “from the Canis Major galaxy” and swept our solar system with a sandstorm of intergalactic dust. Consequently a purple cloud, named Chopra by its New Delhi discoverers, has formed between Venus and Earth. (I wondered here if there is perhaps a nod to M P Shiel’s 1901 novel, The Purple Cloud. Then again there is no reason for Kalfař, Czech born but who emigrated - the blurb says immigrated, there’s an end-point bias for you - to the US when he was sixteen.)

The Spaceman of the title, and our narrator, is Jakub Procházka, a man with a professional fascination with space dust and a professorship in astrophysics. With no other country publicly willing to investigate the Chopra phenomenon, the Czech Republic steps up to the mark, launching him from Petřín Hill on the space shuttle JanHus1. However, the book is not much concerned with the Science-Fictional scaffolding of this premise but more on Jakub’s life before the mission and his mental state while on it.

Not long into his voyage Jakub begins to perceive another living creature in his spaceship, a spider-like being whom he dubs Hanuš, after the maker of Prague’s astronomical clock, and which talks to him and enquires about his life. Kalfař’s writing leaves open the question as to whether this is an actual alien or an hallucination and Hanuš’s philosophy gradually begins to drive Jakub’s actions. Even at the end of the novel Hanuš is still a very real presence to Jakub.

The spaceship chapters are up to the last quarter of the book interspersed with the story of Jakub’s life until he became chosen for the mission. Jakub’s father had been a keen Communist and indeed a state torturer. With the fall of the Soviet Union the family’s fortunes of course changed, not helped by his parent’s death in a car crash, and Jakub’s late childhood, being looked after by his grandparents, was dogged by persecution by his peers. One day a man arrived carrying a rusty metal shoe which he said Jakub’s father once used to torture him. This “Shoe Man” now has the law on his side and causes the Procházkas’ eviction from their ancestral home – a telling reminder that injustice does not only exist under oppressive régimes. The most engaging of these “real life” chapters are those which deal with Jakub’s wife, Lenka, how he met her, their life together, and how, unknowingly to Jakub, they began drifting apart. This is a detailed portrait of a relationship.

In a clever decision by Kalfař the flashbacks are narrated in the present tense while the story of Jakub’s trip in space and its aftermath are in the past tense. This adds to the dreamy, hallucinatory nature of the space-based sections while the Earth bound sections are agreeably gritty. At one point Jakub sees Laika the dog drift past his ship, “her body preserved by the kindness of the vacuum, denying the corrosive effects of oxygen.” (Quite how she escaped the confines of the capsule she had been launched in Kalfař doesn’t explain, but it had me wondering.) This is of course a touch that borders on magic realism, emphasising the strangeness of Jakub’s voyage, but one of the novel’s concerns is the necessity to fight against or to accept the absurdity, the sheer unlikeliness, of the universe. In Jakub’s world even in space persecution cannot be avoided. Hanuš’s species has been pursued across galaxies by creatures called Gorompeds intent on its extinction. It is a neat touch that while Jakub uses the word humanity to describe our kind, Hanuš characterises us as humanry.

The book is also a primer on the history of Prague, the Czechs, and their achievements. To this end we are shown the martyrdom of Jan Hus (though in an apparent aside which is also a neat piece of foreshadowing Kalfař considers the possibility that Hus might have been replaced by a relative lookalike and lived out his days in seclusion,) the tragedy of Vaclav Havel – a man wanting only to write poetry but who instead became public property - who “lost his typewriter,” the plot of the opera Rusalka and the line from it, “All sacrifices are futile” that seems to apply to Jakub’s imminent demise at the hands (tendrils?) of the Chopra cloud, the impossible dilemma faced by Emile Hácha in Hitler’s office as he was offered ignominy or the slaughter of his country.

As the JanHus1 disintegrates in the purple cloud Hanuš disappears and Jakub is rescued by a “phantom” (deniable, incognito) Russian spaceship. He thwarts their authorities’ intention to detain him forever by interfering with the ship’s controls on its landing descent, making it crash, and so limps on into an afterlife in which everyone but the Shoe Man, whom he confronts in a park and whose complicity in his choice for the mission he uncovers, thinks he is dead.

The strangeness of the part of the narrative taking place in space, the distancing Jakub feels even when back on Earth, is echoed by the question he asks himself, “What if our existence is a field of study in probability conducted by the universe?”

My main thought during reading this is that in the flashback sections it bears far more similarity to a mainstream novel from Central/Eastern Europe than to Science Fiction. Kalfař writes in USian but odd word choices, phrases and emphases sometimes make the text seem like a translation - yet all of these add to the overall effect.

To see an examination of the history - and present - of a small country in the guise of a Science Fiction novel is an unusual but welcome phenomenon. But is this a trick Kalfař can pull off again?

One of my books of the year though, without a doubt.

[sharonstern · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Truly the best historical fiction/contemporary satire in the form of an epic space western buddy film romance I've read in a long time! Wildly inventive, yet still satisfyingly grounded in stories of recognizable people. This is a really impressive first novel. I'm giving Spaceman of Bohemia five stars, because it was just so fun to read.

[charl08-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kurak: Do you consider Jakub an idealist?
Lenka P: Jesus Christ, what a question. He’s flying a spaceship to nowhere. What else would you call a man who does such a thing?

Jakub is the Czech Republic’s first space explorer, as the small Eastern European state takes advantage of a new kind of space dust appearing 8 months away from earth. A scientist, a specialist in kinds of spacedust, he grabs the opportunity, but as the reader learns from flashbacks to his childhood and his marriage, his choices come from a desire to make reparations for his father’s political acts under communism. His decision to become an astronaut will have consequences for his relationship with his wife:
I’m no Penelope. I don’t want to wait around for a hero’s return. I don’t want the life of a woman in epic poetry, looking pretty as I stand on shore and scan the horizon for his ship once he’s finished conquering. Perhaps I sound awful. But what about my life, my hopes for myself?
Jakub’s exploration finds far less, and far more than he anticipated, not least a hero of space exploration history:
I was awake, and this was real. It was her, the outcast of Moscow, the first living heroine of spaceflight, a street bandit transformed into a nation’s pride.
It was Laika the dog. Her body preserved by the kindness of the vacuum….Earth could provide her with no further honors, while the cosmos gave her immortality.

It’s a fascinating read, although I’m not sure I’d go so far as some of the blurbers - for me it lost track towards the end. For a first novel it’s beyond ambitious - I’ll look for his next book.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jakub Prochazka has never forgotten the Shoe Man who turned his grandparents out of their home. He appeared with an iron shoe that Jakub's father once used to torture him. Jakub's father had been an informer when Czechoslovakia was under Soviet rule, a ranking member of the Party, an expert torturer. Then came the collapse of the USSR and the trial, and orphan Jakub living with his grandparents.

When my father the hero was lost, my father the nation's villain came to light.

Jakub's dream of becoming a scientist is partly inspired by the desire to reestablish Prague as a center of scientific research.

But mostly Jakub desires to restore his family name, remove the curse as it were. When he is offered the chance to go into space and investigate Chopra, a strange purple dust cloud, he eagerly accepts. He will be a hero, bringing scientific glory back to the homeland.

Even if it means leaving his beloved wife behind, an unwilling Penelope left in limbo as her husband explores new worlds.

During his isolated journey through the solar system Jakub has a lot of time to miss his wife, think about the past, and discuss his life with a new friend--the giant black arachnid, the last of his kind, with an interest in earthlings. He teaches Jakub his people's tenants: The body must not be violated. Truths must not be feared.

When the Chopra cloud is reached, Jakub faces challenges that change his life. In the end, Jakub must decide on what kind of life awaits him.

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar is an unusual book, at once funny and probing, emotionally wise, improbable, a blend of philosophy and fantasy. Exactly the kind of genre-bending read I enjoy dipping into a few times a year!

Kalfar is a Czech-American who came to the US at age 15, and says he learned English from The Cartoon Network. This is his first novel. He holds an MFA from New York University. I look forward to reading more from this young author.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

[cglanovsky · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had a hard time beginning this book. There was a clumsiness to the premise that didn't sit well. We're told that a comet from another galaxy has passed through our solar system. The first question is how we're meant to think they know it came from another galaxy, but that's really sort of minor. The narrator goes on to explain how a cloud of dust left behind between the orbits of Earth and Venus turned the night sky purple. First of all, unless the cloud is ring shaped and goes all around the sun, the Earth would have moved past the cloud at about 1,000 miles an hour, but in the book the sky is permanently purple for months if not years. Still, minor. The big problem is a big problem because it's just so simple. Anyone from anywhere with a grade school knowledge of the solar system should have been able to avoid this mistake: why would the NIGHT sky change color? Night is when the hemisphere is directed away from the sun and therefore away from Venus and anything in between. The daytime sky could have been changed. I could have been fine with that, but it's not. It's purple at night.
There were a few more things like this. At one point a character is described as adept at moving around even through the "vacuum" within the space craft when obviously he meant to refer to the lack of gravity, if it was a vacuum the protagonist saying it would be dead. Later he describes seeing "sand and rock" on the surface of Venus even though it's famously shrouded in an incredibly thick atmosphere of opaque clouds. There were others, very minor, like referring to bits of hair from shaving as "follicles" when really that's the name for the space from which hair emerges. Eventually I learned to get past it, but it was very distracting at first.

Ultimately, I realized the book was to be read as historical fiction than science fiction. Once I realized that the space stuff was only a framing device for telling a story about how history affects our lives I was better able to forgive and actually enjoy the quirkiness of the aliens and the secret agent astronauts. The emotional content of the protagonist's relationships is actually pretty well done. When you add to the novel's actual merits the mitigating circumstances that the author is writing in his second language and is less than 30 years old it gets harder and harder to find fault, especially without any debut novel of my own to back it up.

Hard Science Fiction this is not, but that's okay in the end.

[jjbooklvr · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jakub is not your typical astronaut. By a longshot. But he does answer the call when the Czech government wants to make its mark and send him into space to investigate a mysterious cloud near Venus. We feel his isolation, which soon turns to desperation, as he nears his target. Along the way we meet an alien spider-like creature who becomes Jakub's sounding board as he reflects on his life. A creature who it turns out loves Nutella. But is the creature real? Can Jakub complete his mission and return to Earth? Those are just two of the questions we face in this literary science fiction story. What I really loved is how this book took us places I didn't expect. We also get a look at Post-WWII Eastern Europe as the Czech Republic tries to move away from Communist rule. We explore the meaning of family and how it shapes us no matter how hard we might try to change. Finally we feel the heartbreak of love and the price we pay for happiness. This is the kind of book that will bounce around inside your head long after you finish.

[auntmarge64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A searing examination of one man's soul as he struggles to atone for his father's war crimes and garner acclaim for his family's name.

Jakub Procházka, orphaned after the Velvet Revolution in which Vaclav Havel became the leader of Czechoslovakia, finds out young that his father tortured political prisoners for the Communists when he and his beloved grandparents, by whom he is being raised, are driven from their village. In Prague, Jakub studies hard to make his grandparents proud, and he becomes a renowned expert on cosmic dust. He is eventually recruited to be his country's first astronaut in order to study the particles in a cloud which has formed between Venus and Earth. He leaves his wife to embark on the eight-month round-trip, mesmerized at first but then slowly deteriorating after his wife stops communicating with him and disappears. Soon thereafter he finds another being on the ship, but whether it's real or a hallucination remains to be seen. He and the creature develop a friendship as they discuss the meaning of life, especially in the context of Jakub's memories, which the creature can access at will. In those memories the history of modern Czechoslovakia and of life under its various regimes is laid bare for the reader. As the ship approaches the cloud, Jakub finds himself not wanting to leave his friend, but events within the cloud take the situation out of his control.

A brilliant banquet of description, not least of the storms a human can weather within himself as he learns new truths. At first I thought the descriptions would drive me mad myself, but they only add to the reader's depth of knowledge of this thoughtful man who, in the end, discovers he wants only to return to his beginnings and be anonymous. Funny and suspenseful at times, this book had me wishing for more of Jakub's life - and for that of his friend.