Interview: Author Caleb Crain

In the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, Prague, famously dubbed the Left Bank of the Nineties, attracted its fair share of aspiring expat authors. Many hoped to publish a novel based on their experiences; Caleb Crain is one of the few who managed this feat – albeit more than two decades after his original stay in the Czech capital.

The last time I was in the Czech Republic as the summer of 1993, and it seemed to me then that it had already changed remarkably, so I can only imagine how different it is now. In photos that friends send me, Prague looks much brighter than I recall (but of course camera technology has changed, too, in the last couple of decades). While I was writing, I ruled out any trips to Prague because I didn’t want my memory of the early days to be tampered with by later impressions, but now that the book is finished, I do wish I could visit again.

Sending a relative innocent into unfamiliar territory is an awfully convenient setup for a novelist, because it supplies the main character with a motive for observing closely: Everything is strange and new. While I was writing, I re-read Henry James, Alice in Wonderland, and Christopher Isherwood but I think it was more because I like them and found a sort of comfort in them than because I was trying to model my writing on theirs. Still, I’m sure they left a trace.  

I’m hoping the reader will see the parallels and also see through them. Jacob is somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and the Czechs are somewhere between communism and capitalism, but it isn’t quite as simple as dependency on the one hand and independence on the other. Capitalism isn’t developmentally inevitable after communism, the way that adulthood is after childhood. In fact, the next stage in Czechoslovakia’s economic life turned out to be something not quite as benevolent as the capitalism we’re familiar with here in America (even allowing for the fact that not everyone thinks of American capitalism as benevolent). Nor is adulthood itself all it’s cracked up to be. The psychologist Erik Erikson came up with the term “psychosocial moratorium” to describe the state of fending off for as long as one can the social definitions and conventional expectations that come with adulthood. The nontechnical term for the state is “bohemia”.

Jacob, the main character, has the idea that he’s arrived in Prague too late to experience the spirit of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, which took place a year before. I think that’s part of what it feels like to be young: the sense that it’s already too late, that the story is over and it’s not clear you have a place in it. But another part of being young is the sense that a new world is dawning and that you’re one of the few who will get to see it. In the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, both ideas were very much in the air. So were a lot of hints of the history that hadn’t unfolded yet: a war in Iraq, anxiety about terrorism, a triumphalist note among politicians on the right, the first suggestions of gay marriage. 

I’m afraid I have a policy of not commenting about that particular incident, other than to say that I stand by my original review.  

As a long-time reviewer, I may be more aware than other authors that reviews are written by human beings, and I might be more willing, on that account, to take them with a grain of salt. I don’t think reviews are addressed to authors, though of course authors read them (I read mine, anyway); reviews are addressed to a book’s prospective readers. That said, the reception of my novel hasn’t been a very good test of my philosophy, because I’ve really lucked out. The reviews have been extraordinarily thoughtful and generous in spirit, and I feel very grateful for them.  

Not quite as much as I thought I would be. I’ve had a fair amount of engagement with Czech literature over the years. A long time ago, I translated a campaign biography about Václav Havel and about half a dozen short stories by other Czech writers, and I’ve written essays about Havel, who’s a hero of mine, as well as about Milan Kundera. I’ve read and loved novels by Jiří Weil, Karel Čapek, Ladislav Fuks. Maybe Jacob’s innocence owes something to the innocence of some of Bohumil Hrabal’s heroes?

Nowadays, pretty rusty. I took advantage of the license of fiction and let Jacob become, by the end of the novel, rather better at Czech than I ever became myself. Whenever characters spoke to each other in Czech, I wrote their dialogue in Czech first. But since I then proceeded to translate it myself, no one will ever know how many mistakes I made.

If the novel is ever translated into Czech, I’ve thought of giving it the title “Bylo nebylo,” a phrase that literally means, “There was and there wasn’t,” but is usually rendered in English as “Once upon a time….”

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