SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA

For readers of David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, and Jonathan Safran Foer (a teacher of the author’s), this is THE MARTIAN meets LIFE OF PI and the film CASTAWAY.

Debut author Jaroslav Kalfar’s SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA, in the lineage of Kurt Vonnegut, is a deeply moving, very funny, jauntily philosophical, and genre-bending cosmonaut’s ride past the realm of the known and back, which shows us that no matter how far our explorations take us, it’s always love, family, and friendship that we pine for.

Jaroslav Kalfar is 27 and came to the U.S. at the age of 15 knowing very little English.

Here is a global story for now that is also deeply aware of history, entertaining and enlightening and gripping in equal measure, telling us both where we’ve come from and where we might be headed. A comet has streaked through our galaxy leaving in its wake a giant cloud of astral dust that hovers between Earth and Venus and changes our zodiacal sky to purple. None of the world’s superpowers wants to risk sending a human being on the six-month round trip to collect and test the material, and in that void, a Czech astronaut, Jakub Prochazka, volunteers to go, dreaming of heroism. The story alternates between his mission and his memories of his childhood and parents and grandparents and various tragedies (and tragicomedies) within the formerly totalitarian Czech regime, for which his late father tortured fellow citizens, a disgrace that Jakub wishes to atone for. The story also details his love for his wife, Lenka, who, to his horror and disbelief, files for divorce while he’s in space and sends him into an existential cascade. I haven’t mentioned that his constant companion in outer space is a giant talking arachnid, which Jakub may or may not be hallucinating.

For all of its genre-bending adventure, however, SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA affirms those bedrock earthbound values of love, family, and home. As Jakub himself rediscovers, no matter how far you go, “if what you love gets away from you, in the end you are only walking in a labyrinth with no exits.” Will Jakub survive and learn, in Eliot’s famous parlance, that the end of all our travels will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time?

The author is charming and brilliant. He has a fabulous backstory (including a tattoo of a spaceman on his forearm!) and that will offer wonderful off-the-page coverage. He’s a superstar through and through, intensely imaginative and devoted to his craft, one who will go on to write many more wonderful novels after SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA.